Many FBOs have a small flight school as part of their operation, but Redbird Skyport, one of two service providers at San Marcos (Texas) Regional Airport, is a flight school with an FBO. Parent company Redbird is well known in the flight training sector for affordable motion simulators and other training devices, and the flight school/simulator showroom occupies half of the 17,000-sq-ft terminal. That is a plus for the FBO’s customers, as most will take the tour over to the other side of the building and spend some time looking at the equipment.

“We let people come in and take a look at them, hands on as long as they’re not being used for a flight lesson," said John Koenreich, the FBO’s general manager. “Most people will pick up a brochure or call and get a discovery flight or something after visiting. So it provides huge benefits.” Each year, the location hosts the Redbird Migration, a training technology conference that attracts hundreds of guests.

Redbird opened the hybrid FBO/flight school at the end of 2011. Originally San Marcos Army Air Field and then Gary Air Force Base, the facility was essentially abandoned by the military in the early 1960s and divided between the newly established Gary Job Corps Center, today the largest vocational training site in the country, and the airport. Today, the airport sees 70,000 operations a year, the majority of them piston, as the airport waits for development of the surrounding community to catch up.

'Jumping into the Jet Age'

“We want to jump into the jet age,” explained Koenreich. “We want this to be a destination because being 15 to 20 minutes farther from Austin is the only negative about San Marcos. We’re out of the congested airspace, we’re $2 cheaper a gallon on fuel, we’ve got world-class facilities, and we’ve got practically unlimited ramp space, 500 feet wide by a mile long.” He sees the airport, located between rapidly growing Austin and San Antonio, eventually developing into one of those busy business aviation hubs that ring a major city. “That’s just a thing that is going to come on its own, but again as a business you always try to find a catalyst to make it happen more quickly,” Koenreich told AIN.

Along the way, the FBO has tried some experiments to boost its visibility, one of them being a month-long $0.99-per-gallon promotion for avgas. The company anticipated it would sell 40,000 gallons of 100LL over the course of the month, but it exceeded that amount in the first week, and when the promotion ended after two weeks the FBO had pumped 120,000 gallons and handled 3,500 airplanes. While the money lost selling fuel below cost was offset by industry sponsors, Koenreich said the event was curtailed because his line crews were working 16-hour days, seven days a week to meet the demand. “We were going to hurt somebody if we kept it up.”

The airport does see some bizav traffic, and the Redbird FBO is home to nine turbine-powered aircraft (from a Westwind Astra to a pair of PC-12s), which are housed in the facility’s 13,000 sq ft of hangar space. The adjoining terminal provides a spacious lobby, café, pilot shop, crew lounge with showers, flight-planning area, a pair of A/V-equipped conference rooms seating 10 and 50, a rampside outdoor sheltered patio, crew car, shuttle van, onsite car rental and concierge service. Open seven days a week from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. with after-hours callout available, the Phillips 66-branded FBO pumps 350,000 gallons of fuel annually from its fuel farm, which holds 12,000 gallons each of jet-A and 100LL. It is served by a pair of 3,000-gallon jet-fuel tankers and a 1,200- and 1,000-gallon avgas truck.

Most of the FBO's NATA Safety 1st trained line service staff are also pilots. “Redbird pays for private pilot training for any of our employees, and a lot of our employees take us up on it,” noted Koenreich. “It benefits them, and it benefits us. Having all our people be pilots helps them to understand the industry better.” To give his staff, most of whom had no FBO experience before joining the company, even more familiarity with the aviation service game, once a month Koenreich fires up his Piper Lance and takes one or two employees to larger FBOs in the region where they can see things from a customer perspective. After their return, he debriefs the staffers on how Redbird compares with the other location, and they discuss what can be adapted at Redbird to fine-tune best practices.

Redbird requires that its line service and CSRs know customers' names—both pilots and passengers (in the case of customers based at the airport). “In any business you can get recognized and remembered for two things: one is for really screwing up, and the other is for exceeding expectations,” said Koenreich. “If you just meet expectations, there was nothing wrong with the visit, but it's not going to make customers go out and talk to the next person they see about the experience they had with us, so what we try to do every day in everything we do is exceed the customers' expectations.”