Together

A Word From Our Chairman

On behalf of my fellow Commissioners, we want to congratulate and thank the entire airport staff for the extraordinary year the airport experienced. The type of success and progress that we achieved would not have been possible without the talent, dedication and hard work of the airport’s family of employees. We began the year with high hopes, and thanks to them, our highest expectations were exceeded.

It’s always impressive when an airport can add one new airline to their portfolio of air service in one calendar year, but it is extremely rare to have two new airlines begin service in a single year. That said, we achieved that, along with a significant increase in capacity by our existing carriers. This success in adding service and capacity helped us achieve a record year for enplanements, finishing just under 1.8M. It is a phenomenal  accomplishment to realize that we have grown our enplanements by almost 1M passengers in the past 10 years.

Air service development is very important to us and is, in many ways, the lifeblood of the airport terminal. However, the airport itself is much larger than its airline passenger service. 

With demand continuing to accelerate for our air cargo operations, we have prioritized that sector of the airport for significant expansion. We are well underway to bring online a new and much larger air cargo complex in 2024. We completed the apron for this expansion in 2022 and expect to begin construction on the new air cargo complex in 2023. We believe this will be a game changer for us and our region in terms of economic impact, and have confidence that the air cargo needs of Hyundai and their suppliers will contribute to that expansion.

This past year also saw our city and region join together to keep the 165th Airlift Wing of the Georgia Air National Guard fully funded and based at the airport. A coalition of Savannah’s elected officials, concerned citizens and energized business community joined together to successfully lobby to keep the unit in Savannah and at the airport, but also identified ways to expand their value and mission.

In the face of all the growth and prosperity in our part of the State, Gulfstream remains our top partner at the airport, and we worked hard in 2022 to clear the path for their next expansion. The recently announced $150M expansion will create 1,600 new aeronautical jobs here at SAV with more to come. This expansion further solidifies our airport complex as the Worldwide Headquarters for Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation.

We were honored, once again, to be selected by the readers of the two most prestigious travel publications, Condé Nast and Travel & Leisure, as the NUMBER ONE airport in the U.S. in 2022. Accomplishments and accolades like these do not happen on their own. They happen because we continue to have a great team here that comes together to make big things happen. We look forward to continued success in 2023.

Stephen S. Green
Chairman