Desert Magazine: Tell us about your background and how you gravitated toward this kind of position.
Harry Barrett, Jr.: I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. I knew at a very young age that I wanted to be in aviation in some way, and I actually wanted to be an astronaut. At the age of 20, I left Kansas City and joined the Air Force. I spent 11 years in the Air Force, flying the E-3 AWACS and the AC-130 gunship. The last four years of that, I helped the Air Force integrate drones into the DOD in the intelligence programs. And then, from there, [I] decided to transition into airport management. I just wanted to try something new.
Desert: Where did you start?
Barrett: I started at Bellingham International Airport in airport operations and aircraft rescue firefighting. I did that for a couple of years and then moved to Seattle Tacoma International Airport, where I ran landside operations that included public parking, ground transportation, employee bussing, things like that. And then I managed my first airport, which was Renton Municipal Airport. That's just outside of Seattle. It's got the only Boeing 737 manufacturing line on the globe. I did that for a period of about five years.
Desert: How did you make the move to Palm Springs?
Barrett: Right before the pandemic hit, I saw an opportunity here as the deputy director of operations and maintenance, applied for the role, was brought down for an interview, was successful, and assumed that job. I did that for about two years, was promoted to assistant airport director after Tom Nolan left, and then to executive director after my predecessor, Ulises Aguirre, left.
Desert: Was that a huge step in your career?
Barrett: [It was] a massive step in my career. This is the first commercial airport that I've run. The airport in Renton was a general aviation airport. It had the Boeing manufacturing activities like general aviation aircraft and corporate aircraft, but this was the first commercial airport that I had run with a larger staff, larger operation, the 13 airlines, the rental car companies, etc.
Desert: How has this airport expanded since it became a commercial airport?
Barrett: The airport has grown with the Valley. It started off as a very, very small regional airport, and it stayed a regional airport through the mid-2000s. It was a regional airport. We had some long-time tenants here. It became an international airport … with pre-cleared Canadian service. The aviation industry has grown so much that we're starting to see exponential growth just in the number of passengers, the type[s] of aircraft, [and] how many operations we're seeing here a day. And that's translating throughout the Valley into hotel stays and visitor spend[ing].
Desert: I think you said earlier in the conversation that there were 13 airlines now that flew in here.
Barrett: We have all the major legacy carriers, so, American, United, Delta, Southwest. All of our airlines are listed on our website, flypsp.com, so … you can use that to look [them] up. We have all the majors here, as well as some small carriers like Allegiant [and] Flair – which is [a] Canadian carrier – flies out of here. Porter flies from Canada, as well.
Desert: How much of the airport is used for private aviation?
Barrett: We have two fixed-based operators that run the private aviation side of it. So, Signature Aviation [and] Atlantic Aviation on the airfield. Of our aircraft operations, we do about 70,000 aircraft operations a year. About 20,000 of that is private aircraft, so [it’s] a pretty substantial part. Over the years, it's leveled off, but we've seen growth there, as well. There's actually a little bit of competition between Palm Springs and [the] Jackie Cochran airport (East Valley) with the private aviation sector.
Desert: And how much military use is there?
Barrett: We do have military use – I would say 500 or 600 flights a year from the military. They do use it as a training opportunity to fly through Palm Springs. We also do troop redeployments here. Twentynine Palms uses the opportunity to move some of the Marines around from their co-location. You'll see some C-130 activity fly through, as well as just training opportunities from other military bases.
Desert: In the three years since you became executive director, what kind of growth have you seen?
Barrett: Tremendous growth. It's leveled off this year, but we were seeing double-digit growth – about the 11% mark … for the last couple of years coming out of the pandemic. Palm Springs was one of the first airports, if not the first airport, to recover in the nation coming out of the pandemic, in part because a lot of people were moving here for second-home ownership and to avoid the urban population centers. We benefited from that greatly here.
Desert: How do you prepare for that kind of growth?
Barrett: You don't. You react. We actually had to change our business practices, our mindset on how we did things because people were so used to the airport being a little bit smaller, a little bit more boutique. We've had to grow the operation. We've had to make operational adjustments to plan for additional aircraft here, for additional passengers. We had to reconfigure our security checkpoint. We've had to work on planning parking in a different way. And part of that has been reacting to the circumstance of the day, part of that has been really taking a pause and being thoughtful about how we're planning for the future and what that looks like for us. We've spent a lot of time doing master planning to make sure that we're capturing the growth for the next 20 years.
Desert: How do you physically expand when you're surrounded by a city?
Barrett: Typically, you like to keep airports as far away as possible from urban areas. We look at, not only the on-airport land use, but [also] the surrounding land use to determine what actually fits in with the business model, and how do we make those changes and adapt in the moment? That could include some land acquisition. It could include what we call navigation easements or aviation easements, which means that we would work directly with neighborhoods to make sure that they're comfortable with living near an airport. They understand that they're going to have aircraft flying over their homes or over their businesses. There may be changes to the general plan for the City of Palm Springs and how we accommodate traffic, and how do we accommodate neighborhood growth and industrial growth around the airport? All of those things are being looked at holistically.
Desert: Will there come a time in the future where this land is so valuable that the airport itself needs to relocate elsewhere in the desert?
Barrett: I would say it's a very remote possibility, in part because [of] the cost it would take to relocate an airport and the number of years of planning that would have to go into that. Relocating an airport is not an easy task. You're talking about 20 [or] 30 years of study just to make that move happen. Because you're not only relocating the land assets themselves, you're also having to plan the airspace and all of those things that are connected to that relocation. So, could it happen? Yes. Is it in the short- or medium-term plans for the city or for the region right now? No.
Desert: If you keep experiencing such high demand and such growth, do you then try to find a way to partner with, say, the Cochran airport, to alleviate some of that pressure?
Barrett: Part of my role is to make sure the aviation system is balanced. Whether that's we try to equitably distribute commercial aircraft traffic or whether Thermal now becomes the new general aviation airport and Palm Springs sticks to commercial aviation or balancing cargo capacity throughout the facility, we're generally having those discussions, not in a bubble, but generally with the region, with the other airports to see what works and what fits with the system.
Desert: How many passengers per day, in peak season, come through here and leave?
Barrett: This year, I think we're topping out at 13,000 passengers in a peak day, and that's way up from what we traditionally do. Our benchmark has historically been around the 9,000 mark. Last year, I think it was 11,000 through the checkpoint. This year, it's 13,000 in a day.
Desert: When you see that kind of growth from 9,000 to 13,000, do you have a way to quickly respond to the challenges of that pressure?
Barrett: It's about leveraging not only the facility itself and changing the operations but [also] leveraging your team and making sure that people are put in the right places in the right time to be able to handle and manage the traffic. Part of what we do [is] to facilitate quick passenger processing through … TSA. We deploy canine teams to make sure that screening goes a little bit faster. When we're talking about aircraft operations, part of what we did last year was a project to implement common use at our gates. That way, you don't have one airline dedicated to one gate for the entirety of the planning horizon. We're able to swap those aircraft between gates to give us a little more flexibility to accommodate more aircraft coming through the facility. Now, there will be a point where those operational mitigations just won't work anymore. That's the point where we start to develop the airport and figure out how … we build additional facilities.
Desert: Are there plans in the works now to expand the terminal areas or this physical plant here?
Barrett: Our master planning did include some conceptual development for terminal expansions. It includes a north concourse and a south concourse. We are focused on right now adding at least three gates in the north concourse expansion, hopefully sometime in the next five to seven years. We're more focused on our rental car operations. We have some challenges there, so we need to meet the capacity needs of the rental car companies as they exist right now. And that includes building a consolidated rental car facility. So, we're actively planning for that.
Desert: Of course, the airport has historical and architectural significance. How do you navigate that to make sure the airport retains people's expectations?
Barrett: A lot of stakeholder engagement. Any project that we do on the airport, large or small, frankly, we're spending a lot of time doing some pre-work with the community. For example, one of our projects was to replace the flooring in the main terminal here, [which is] obviously a Donald Wexler-designed terminal. It's in the hearts of a lot of people. They want to see it as it existed back in the 1960s. One of the discussions with replacing the flooring was, "Well, what did the terminal look like back then, and can we replicate that? Can we use the same materials [and] the same colors? What does that look like? Can we modernize it? If we do modernize it, what does it look like?" We spent a lot of time behind the scenes working on getting that part right.
Desert: I noticed that in the directions you gave me to get to your office, you said, "Look for the stairs near the pink door." And it occurred to me just as I was walking by it, that it looked an awful lot like That Pink Door. I assume that is intentional.
Barrett: That is intentional. One of the things we did with our concessions program was focus on local concessions and making sure that when people flew into the facility that they understood that it reflected the community at large. When they leave Palm Springs [International] Airport and they go to Palm Springs or East Valley, they had in their mind things that they wanted to see or places that they wanted to eat or things that they wanted to buy. So, we really focused on making sure that that was reflected in the airport environment, so that when people got into the city that they would be able to experience those things.
Desert: When you took over as director, what were your immediate challenges?
Barrett: Like most airports, we were still in a pandemic, and we were still trying to figure out what does aviation look like, given that we had a health crisis [and] we had staffing challenges at the time. We were actively in a ticketing wing renovation project. And so, having spent $32 million on that, we were trying to figure out if we were going to make up our return on investment. My staff at the time was very, very small. I had 48 individuals running the entire airport. I had to respond to that in terms of adding a ton of staff in a very short period. I went to the City Council and asked for 50 additional bodies, and that in itself took a lot of negotiating and legwork and figuring out, not only what those positions were supposed to be, how quickly we could get them on, but [also] who was going to pay for it.
Desert: Tell me about your relationship with the city.
Barrett: We are an enterprise fund of the City of Palm Springs. We still have to get our legislative approval on the things that we do in terms of development of the airport, how we operate the airport, staffing, things like that. That said, we make our own money. We're not tied to the tax base of the City of Palm Springs, so our revenues come from our user fees – what we charge the airlines or rental car companies in terms of their leases. If we decide that we want to implement a new concessions program, we get money based off of the revenues of that concessions program. We're pretty much self-sustainable, self-funding. And to that end, a lot of what I do is often updates to the city on, "This is how we're operating as a business."
Desert: What are some of the things that you're looking forward to in your job over the next few years?
Barrett: We are at a point with this airport where we're putting on our big boy and girl pants. We've transitioned from a small hub to we're on the cusp of [becoming] a medium-hub airport. Medium-hub meaning where we would compare ourselves to an Orange County, a Long Beach, some of the larger airports that are a little more robust. With that comes a lot of opportunity for a lot of innovation, to do things a little more creatively, to be thoughtful, [to] try and still maintain the characteristics of the airport, but at the same time, be a little more creative in how we execute that. So, not only in just balancing staff with technology, but also in addressing climate issues and … aircraft safety. How do we keep the aviation system safe? And then, how we create community partnerships, I think there are opportunities there. One of the things we're looking at is working with College of the Desert on pipeline programs to get people more invested in STEM learning, invested in aviation, and hopefully we can grow our talent pool locally for the airport. Air traffic control is a huge issue for us, so if there were a way to create an air traffic control program locally and start to feed the pipeline of air traffic controllers through the system … that would be a benefit to us. Obviously, this is a hospitality-driven region of the state, but I think there's an opportunity to diversify that and get more technician-based skills here.
Desert: Twenty years ago, Palm Springs wasn't a year-round town. Now, it is. I'm just curious how extreme heat affects airport operations.
Barrett: Obviously, there's some seasonality here, but in terms of our ability to get aircraft on and off the ground, it very rarely impacts the aircraft themselves. Where it's probably most impactful is, we are an open-air airport, and so we have to be a little more concerned about the passenger experience and about are we making sure that people are getting cooled and that we still have concessions open to provide them with food and water. We have an on-site aircraft rescue firefighting component that includes a medical component. It's not a wholesale change of our operations, but we do have to make minor adjustments to make sure that the passenger experience still exists for us.
Desert: Lastly, what excited you most about this particular airport? What did you love about this place?
Barrett: It's a cool and unique airport, and I even hear it from my peers in the industry, a lot of whom are like, "Oh, you have the best airport to run. I wish you would leave, so I can take that over." [I say,] “No, I'm staying here." I think being in a resort town, running an airport that is unique as this, it's open-air, a little more boutique, has the opportunity to grow, but we have the opportunity to do a lot of innovative things. I think that's what excited me the most about this airport. And really, for most airport directors coming into a job, they're looking to create, they're looking to leave their thumbprint, and so I've been able to make my mark a little bit in the last few years, and hopefully, when I do eventually leave here, it'll be reflected in some of the work that's been done.
