Las Vegas Reid International Airport Director Rosemary Vassiliadis discusses the inner workings of a major U.S. O&D airport, plans to build a second Las Vegas airport and more.
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Aaron Karp:
Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for Window Seat, our Aviation Week air transport podcast. I'm ATW and Routes senior editor Aaron Karp, and I'm delighted to welcome you on board. This week we are joined by the longtime director of Las Vegas Harry Reid International Airport, Rosemary Vassiliadis. Her formal title is director of aviation for Clark County, Nevada. In this role, she not only oversees Las Vegas airport, but also four general aviation airports and a total of 18,000 employees. She's been the Las Vegas airport director for 13 years, and before that spent 16 years as deputy director. So, she has been deputy director or director for 28 years and has worked in the Clark County Aviation Department for 30 years overall. On September 12, Rosemary will be retiring to be succeeded by current deputy director James Chrisley. Given her vast experience, we thought it would be great to speak to her about her career, the airport industry in general, and Las Vegas airport in particular. Reid Airport or LAS is one of the more interesting airports in the world in that Las Vegas is entirely dependent on it. Las Vegas economy is driven by vacationers, business conference attendees, and hosting major events such as the 2024 Super Bowl. Sitting in the middle of a desert and catering to visitors, usually spending just a few days in the city, Las Vegas needs the airport to work for the city to work. Directing LAS is one of the more challenging jobs in the air transport industry. Rosemary, we thank you for taking the time to join us today as your retirement approaches.
Rosemary Vassiliadis:
Well, thank you, Aaron. I'm thrilled to be here.
Aaron Karp:
For starters, how are you feeling as you approach retirement and please share with us what are some of the biggest things you have learned over the last 30 years?
Rosemary Vassiliadis:
Well, retirement's bittersweet, so that's good. Which means it was just a fabulous, phenomenal run in every way, both professionally and personally because when you're at the airport, it is 24/7 and it becomes part of you. But fortunately, it was my passion, so it was very easy to adapt to that. What have I learned? I have learned so much. I don't know where to start. I guess if I had to sum it up, it would be that airports are truly a piece of the foundation for their communities’ economic development, economic benefit. And no matter what happens in the world sooner or later, it affects your airport. And that has been, actually it's been invigorating to be part of something that has such an impact on your local community.
Aaron Karp:
And how has the airport industry changed over the last 30 years?
Rosemary Vassiliadis:
Oh, my goodness. Well, everything has changed. The first thing is growth. In the past 30 years, the airline industry, air travel, the how they get passengers from point A to point B, how the world has opened up. That's what Las Vegas has benefited from more than anything else, is the international traveler and the direct point-to-point nonstop visitor and/or passenger. And also to have that availability for our community and our residents to get to go around the world.
Aaron Karp:
And in particular, how has the Las Vegas airport changed other than it used to be McCarran Airport and is now Reid Airport, but other than the name change, what are some of the big changes over the last three decades?
Rosemary Vassiliadis:
Yes, Aaron, you're right about that. The biggest change is the growth that we had to accommodate. So, when I started at this airport, we had the A, B, and C gates. So, one terminal with really two concourses, if you will. The D gates were just being built, and they were opened about a year after I started at the airport. And that was the first time that it was a detached independent concourse. So, you could not walk to it, you had to take a tram and oh my gosh, people were like, oh, how do you get there? Oh, how far is it? It was something that until you experienced it, it wasn't well received at first, but then it became very, very normal, just like any other large airport. And then we just kept on building, well, we built the D gates originally, we built two of the wings and it was designed as an X for four wings.
And in about a year after we opened the two wings, we were already in design for the third wing and then the fourth wing. And then we took on the largest public work project at the time in this state, Terminal 3, a $2.1 billion project that was a unit terminal. So that was again, a completely different operation than we ever had before. And then international just kept on growing and growing. So, we had to then connect Terminal 3, which where our port is at and the facility to the D gates to accommodate the growth in the widebodies that come in. Meanwhile, back at the ranch when I first started, a little bit after that, RJs [regional jets] took over. If you remember, America West did an entire night bank of almost all RJs and Las Vegas was a big beneficiary of it because the East Coast, you could easily put in one more leg in your day, you could arrive in Las Vegas at any time and everything's open.
It's a 24-hour town. So, we went through all that. Now, accommodating RJs at an airport isn't the easiest thing because they are smaller. The jet bridges have to be functioning a little bit differently. More gates were needed for a large bank. So, we went through all that and then that transformed to international and widebodies. So, we had to make gates and jet bridges and hold rooms accommodate that as best as we could, which is what T3 was all about. And then Southwest, overnight practically, they didn't double our capacity, but when they reconfigured their [Boeing] 737 aircraft from what was 127 seats per aircraft and they went up to 172 seats per aircraft, and we all know how they can fill up a plane, that really took us to a different level of how do you accommodate that many people in a hold room, not only by seating and having chargers and all different things like that, but also the concessions? So, the biggest thing I can say is the evolution. We are constantly evolving and Las Vegas is dependent on hospitality and the tourist and leisure traveler for most of the time. Until the NFL stadium opened a few years ago, we were very, very dependent on that and therefore a very seamless experience. So, they would come back, they know they could, oh, we could fit Vegas in for a weekend because that's what we needed.
Aaron Karp:
And you mentioned the RJs, those are regional jets that are maxed at about 76 seats, and Southwest is the leading airline at your airport. You mentioned the big events, you mentioned the Super Bowl, and I remember talking to you before the Super Bowl and all of the preparations you were doing and just what was that like hosting an event where there was the biggest sporting event in the United States, a stadium seating, I think 70,000-75,000 people and just so people coming really from all over the world? And the logistics challenge of that was just enormous and from all reports, things went pretty smoothly. So, what was that like preparing for that and going through that event?
Rosemary Vassiliadis:
Well, thank you. It did go smoothly, so much so that they're coming back. So, with that, it took a lot of planning and it really started a little bit more than a year beforehand. So, we sent a team to the Super Bowl city the year before us, and they were able to have boots on the ground, if you will, in that airport's control center and operation center to see what was really needed and what were all the rules. I'm sure you know NFL has a lot of their own rules. Super Bowl is its own entity that has its own team and sets of rules. And so, what we had to do, first of all, is get to know it. What is it that they're asking for? What is the anticipation of Vegas? Vegas always seems when there's an inaugural anything from a convention to a concert to a mega event such as this, a soccer game, a tournament, we always see F1.
We always seem to break all the records. So, we knew that it was going to be the prior year plus and having our team, our operations team, experience it, and they brought back just priceless information for us to start planning. So, what we did is of course work very closely with the Super Bowl team. They do have an aviation person attached to it, so we got to know him very, very well. We worked with the airlines on what are you doing to respond to this? Are you upgauging? Are you adding flights? What are the charter flights? And then we worked with our FAA tower, our air traffic control tower, on how can we best now accommodate this? What are the behaviors? When do people start coming in? We were lucky. We have two full-service general aviation airports, one in North Las Vegas, one in Henderson, and they were crucial to the success of this.
I'm going to say both events, so I am going to go ahead and put F1 in there too. Although Super Bowl, we broke every record with Super Bowl—number of operations, number of passengers, number of parking spaces, the type of aircraft, much more upgraded business jet. We had a business jet come in from the Bay area with two people on it. I mean, that's what they attract when the owners come in, when their friends and families come in. There were actually flights that were for friends and family, both of the teams and of the owners. So, you get to know, you learn that and then you just put all the pieces together.
And we were fortunate that we were able to accommodate everybody with very little delay factor. In our case here at Las Vegas, the GA piece was a little bit unknown because again, it was a first and it far surpassed anything we could ever have imagined.
But we worked closely with NetJets, which is a prime carrier for attendees of the Super Bowl, and they actually set up an entire operation in our Henderson airport and took 200 flights off of LAS to that GA airport. And that was tremendous. One thing that's always hard is people filter in, they come on different days, they come at different times, everybody leaves at the same time. So, Monday morning after the Super Bowl, we did have slots, we did have a reservation system, so we put in all the different layers to try to smooth it as possible.
Aaron Karp:
That's quite interesting about the logistics challenge of the Super Bowl, and it brings to mind the challenge of just moving people through airports. One thing about LAS is that in 2019, the TSA designated it as an innovation airport and to experiment with different ways to do security and move people through quicker. And there's been a lot of talk lately about TSA and things they're doing to try and move people through quicker. Could you talk about that, about the challenge of just moving through the airport and what you see as what TSA is doing and more generally just how airports are evolving to move people through as fast as possible?
Rosemary Vassiliadis:
TSA has grown and developed quite a bit in their lifetime. They were born at the end of 2001. Our airport was federalized in April of 2002. We became an innovation airport in 2019 when that program was taken off. So, we heard about the program, and we invited them to our airport and said, if you want to test things, this is the place to test it because we have the leisure traveler for the most part, which means that they're not as experienced and not used to how the operation works.
A lot of them travel just once a year, maybe even twice a year. And there's probably not one operation that lasts a full year without a tweak to it. We also have conventioneers. So that's basically our business traveler. Again, it's not the delegates—the companies, corporations send many delegates here to our conventions. I think maybe because of cost but not a regular traveler.
With that, they could test all these new technologies and see what the reaction is. How are people still going to divest? What's their mentality on it? And we had them come on down and look at our current checkpoints and we were lucky enough to be selected. What they have done after selecting us is a tremendous amount of investment to open up an innovation checkpoint, which we have in the lower level at T3.
It is a live checkpoint, and it has, since it's been operating, it has turned over on so many different types of equipment, different types of technologies that have been successful and rolled out because they get a real good feel of how will it really work with someone who isn't used to traveling. We're also mainly an O&D, an origin-destination airport. So, you're not hubbing through. So, you are getting everybody at our airport, and it's been a tremendous success to test that technology.
And I do give TSA lot of credit for keeping up with technology, for letting technology do a manual type of procedure. And it has worked tremendously in streamlining the process and having people not having to be pat down every single time, not having your luggage pulled or your carry-on pulled and going through it and taking more time and just creating anxiety. Having technology do all of that has benefited the throughput of our checkpoints—and throughout the nation too—as well as the anxiety level going down and the experience being pretty seamless.
Aaron Karp:
And how about Las Vegas airport right now as you're preparing to leave, what do you see as the current state of the airport? What are some of the future initiatives and just how does the airport stand now in terms of its future?
Rosemary Vassiliadis:
Well, the airport is in a very stable condition. Of course, there's been a downturn nationwide, as well as worldwide, of travelers. The Canadian visitor has hit us as well as so many other destination cities, but it has impacted us. So always being cautious, but with that strong financial foundation that we do have here, we know that we're going to come back.
History has shown it over and over and over again from all the softenings in the 90s to the little one in the early 2000s. And then of course the Great Recession, which is when we decided to build Terminal 3. Thank goodness we did, because then we were ready for that recovery. And that one tells its own story with international success that we had with that terminal through COVID. The state of Nevada was one of the states that were closed after, well, in 9/11, I don’t know how I could forget that one.
We recover, and we're amongst the first to recover. For COVID even though our state was closed, the airports, our two commercial airports were still open. They were essential services. So, what we did during that time is get ready because we know, we knew that they were going to come back ,and we happened to be the first airport—large airport—in the nation to recover.
So now going through where we're at today, we know that air travel's going to be back, international's going to be back. So, what we unveiled several months ago is a modernization plan for LAS for Terminal 1. We have very old facilities in our A and B gates, very old design of round cluster buildings that are quite inefficient. And we have a plan now to take down cluster building at a time and start to build piers. So, we're actually in the process of design for that and we are going to be rolling it out.
And then what I'm most proud of is a second commercial airport. The process has begun. So that is something that we always had in the works. Even when I got to the airport, it was always something that we knew we were going to get because at the end of the day, we have very limited airspace here at LAS. We're in a valley, we have mountains. We butt up against the Department of Defense airspace with Nellis Air Force Base and the missions that they have going on there.
So, we knew one day we were going to proceed, and 2018, we went ahead and resumed going forward on what would it take to prove the need of that airport. So, we restarted the process and our notice of intent, the federal notice of intent was filed in mid-May, and the environmental impact statement has officially begun, and it's about a two- to three-year process for the record of decision. And we are in the middle of that.
Aaron Karp:
And could you talk a little bit more about how the two airports would interact with each other, how large the second airport would be, but how it will actually work in practice, and what's the timeline for when it could actually be operational?
Rosemary Vassiliadis:
So, it would become an airport in our system, so very much like Dulles and National; Midway and O'Hare. So, it will be part of our system. It won't operate independently, depending on what airlines are around. We would work it together. It is located 30 miles south as the crow flies, if you will, from LAS. It's five miles north of state line from California. It is a site that was determined to be the best site. And a Congressional act has now deemed it for a second commercial airport.
There's also two other acts that protect the land around it. One of the issues that we struggle with here at Reid at LAS is encroachment and how the community and the urban area has grown up around the airport and has given us some issues with noise, with flight paths, things like that. So that site is protected with a second Congressional act that would give us, if you will, 17,000 acres, the noise contour around the airport upon a favorable record of decision.
And then we actually went to the state of Nevada and protected another 1 mile barrier around the 17,000 acres. So, we feel good about protecting where that location is at, depending on what the airlines are doing, which is always very hard to predict who is going to be around. We will work with, of course, international number one and most likely the long hauls.
The connectivity is developing. Really every year we have a new type of transportation system that we look at. So, there will be direct connectivity to LAS. So, it may sound like it's far out, but in real time it won't be.
Aaron Karp:
So, we're pushing up against the end of our time and we thank you so much for joining us. One final question, just looking at the airport industry in general, as you look back on your career and especially looking forward, if you were talking to airport directors around the country and around the world, what would you advise them? What do you think are the most important things for them to be thinking about as the airport and air transport industry moves into the future?
Rosemary Vassiliadis:
I think we all need to work together on the modernization of the air traffic control system. There's been little bits and pieces. We here at LAS, we're a beneficiary of a little bit of modernization through Metroplex, but having much more modern equipment, much more consistent equipment from all the large points within the FAA system would benefit us all because then we would know what would be our capacity, what's our efficiencies, and that would just make the whole system work a lot better.
Aaron Karp:
Well, thank you so much Rosemary for joining us, and congratulations on your retirement and good luck and best wishes going forward. And thanks also to our producer, Cory Hitt, and of course, a huge thank you to our listeners. Make sure you don't miss us each week by subscribing to Window Seat on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen. This is Aaron Karp, disembarking from Window Seat.
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