North Carolina’s 72 publicly owned airports contribute more than $72 billion to the state’s economy each year — 11% of the state’s gross domestic product or total economic output — and support nearly 333,000 jobs, according to a report released in January 2023 by the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Division of Aviation.
Airports and aviation-related jobs also provide nearly $23 billion in personal income and contribute $3.7 billion in state and local tax revenues every year, based on 2021 data provided by the airports and FAA, according to NCDOT officials.
The report, “North Carolina: The State of Aviation,” highlights the economic impacts of the state’s public airports and related aviation and aerospace assets that support North Carolina’s aviation economy. NCDOT creates the report every two years to help guide future investment in aviation infrastructure and provide a tool for recruiting aviation and aerospace industry companies and investment, officials explained.
The report contains data compiled and analyzed for NCDOT by North Carolina State University’s Institute for Transportation Research and Education. Impacts are calculated based on factors such as jobs supported by the airports and the businesses that rely on them, business and leisure travelers, and airport capital projects and operations.
North Carolina’s public airport system includes 10 commercial service airports, which offer regularly scheduled passenger service, and 62 general aviation airports.
The report notes that the state’s public airports lease space to more than 4,000 private aircraft that generate more than $5.6 million in property tax revenues for their communities each year.
You can see the full report, including a breakdown of each individual airport’s contributions, at NCDOT.gov/Aviation.
These economic impact reports are based on contrived formulas used to keep more government employees in jobs. The entire North Carolina budget for 2023 shows expenditure of $31B. Based on this report, the state should end all other activities and focus only on airports. What really needs to be analyzed are the balance sheets of government owned airports, which rarely can stand on their own feet without local, state and federal support. Like most other government works (especially government schools), over-spending and over-regulation runs rampant at public airports, as does cronyism with the companies who feed off of them. I used to sell aviation fuel systems to public airports and was shocked with what I learned, how the “system” is rigged to maximize government employment and funnel fat contracts to contractors focused on airports. These impact studies are paid by the same government working to keep public airports a major government employer and cash cow for crony businesses. What is never mentioned are the “lost opportunity costs” – what could have the private sector done with the money if left in their pockets. There are plenty of great examples of thriving private airports around – those are the ones without high fences studded with razor wire around them, and no need for badged entry to get to your Piper Cub.