Prestwick Airport's new business development director Mike Stewart may only have joined the airport three months ago, but he's certainly been busy.
Upon joining the publicly-owned airport last November as business development director of cargo, the airline industry veteran set out to bring some vital freight business back to Prestwick.
Having barely rested his feet under the desk, he secured 285 tonnes of new cargo business, the bulk of which he won securing the freight contract to move the stage set for Madonna’s December show at the SSE Hydro.
Stewart, whose career has seen him build airline businesses across the globe, believes freight is an “easy win” for Prestwick, given it comes with all the amenities in place to move anything from parcels to oil and gas equipment.
However, as Stewart points out, the Madonna cargo win highlights just how far Prestwick had fallen from view under the ownership of New Zealand-based infrastructure investment firm, Infratil.
He said: “Event cargo is something we should be competing for, and the recent Madonna show at the SSC Hydro is a good case in point.
“I was aware of this business was happening, I knew the people who were moving it – Rocket Cargo, a US company which has a large operation in London – and I know the MD.
“So we arranged for Rocket to come up to Prestwick, and that's when we found out Rocket were planning on using Doncaster, which for some reason was their preferred airport.
“I couldn't work out exactly why they would consider Doncaster, but it perhaps shows how far Prestwick has slipped from people's thoughts.”
Infratil had acquired Prestwick Airport in 2001 from transport giant Stagecoach in a £33.4 million deal, but by 2012 the company said it was running up losses of around £2 million a year on Prestwick and another UK asset, Manston Airport in Kent.
Infratil had booked nearly £80 million in writedowns on the value of Prestwick and Manston between 2009 and 2012, and it was in 2012 it decided to market the airports for sale.
Business advisors PwC were brought in to lead a global marketing campaign, but 18 months later no buyers had surfaced and Infratil called it a day, threatening to close Prestwick Airport, which in turn forced the Scottish Government to step in and take the airport into public ownership for a nominal £1 sum.
Stagecoach co-founder Ann Gloag acquired Manston Airport from Infratil in 2013, also for £1, and less than a year later she sold a majority stake in the 800-acre site to regeneration specialists.
However, given Prestwick's importance to the Scottish economy - said to support around 300 jobs directly and a further 1,400 jobs indirectly at the point the Scottish Government stepped in - the job now in hand is to turnaround a loss-making airport back towards commercial viability.
Most recent accounts from the airport, filed last July, show Prestwick racked up an £8.9 million pre-tax loss for the 2015 year to March.
TS Prestwick Holdco Ltd, the company set up to acquire the airport on behalf of Scottish Ministers, noted consolidated losses for the 16 months since the airport was nationalised to March 2015 had run to £11.6 million.
Last August the airport's chief executive Iain Cochrane announced he was stepping down as part of a wider management restructuring which also saw chief commercial officer Graeme Sweenie leave the business.
Andrew Miller, former chief executive of Air New Zealand, who joined TS Prestwick Holdco Ltd as chairman in 2014, stated at the time the future of Prestwick Airport would “likely be quite different from the past”.
Prestwick now has just one passenger carrier – Ryanair – operating from the airport, having lost its only other carrier, Wizz Air, to Glasgow Airport in 2013.
TS Prestwick noted in 2015 accounts, capacity decline would be “more severely felt” in the current financial year as a result of Ryanair's decision to establish a base at Glasgow Airport and transfer some activity from Prestwick.
So that was roughly the lay of the land when Mike Stewart joined the business last November.
His early success in winning new freight work has now seen him elevated to business development director – a role not unfamiliar to him, given he has made a career building airport businesses across the globe.
Having started out as an engineer, Stewart's 25 years in the aviation sector included managing the merger of British Airway's World Cargo regional operations with Dunwoody Airline Services Ltd to form British Airways Regional Cargo - British Airways’ successful UK cargo sales and handling partner.
He went on to take a board position with British Airway's Regional Cargo, which was then bought over by global ground handling giant, Worldwide Flight Services.
And there is no question about his commitment.
He spent five years commuting between Ayrshire and Cape Town, South Africa in a role building Worldwide Flight Services' business in the sub-Sahara region, and he's confident he can build Prestwick back up to being commercially viable.
“I've had a couple of weeks now to look under the bonnet, and I think its fair to say Infratil had taken their eye off the ball at Prestwick,” he said.
“Originally they had good freight managers in place, and then for whatever reason those people left the business a number of years ago and weren't replaced, so I think that sent a message on their stance on cargo.
“Prestwick has a unique capability for handling cargo – more than any other airport in Scotland.
“The cargo business is cyclical, and unlike with passenger traffic where you plan in three and five-year cycles; cargo is generally done within the year and much of the business is day-to-day, so I'm confident we can build the cargo business up again and fairly quickly.”
At present, Prestwick handles around 12 thousand tonnes of cargo a year, and over and above that it processes ad-hoc charter freight which added up to around 1.5 million kilos of cargo last year.
Stewart said: “We're certainly not dying on our feet in terms of cargo, and we're still moving a fair bit of cargo around, but I'm personally looking for the longer term, sustainable business for the airport, and it is really about being innovative.
“Event cargo is something that we can and should be competing for, and an early focus for us is to ensure we are known to event organisers and venue controllers so that Prestwick is being considered for event freight business.”
He adds: “One of the areas I have been involved in in Scotland in recent years is the movement of fish, whisky – stuff we've been doing for thousands of years – but now its truckloads of salmon and seafood being exported from Scotland.
“But so much of that is moving by road, down through London and then through the Channel Tunnel and on to European destinations.
“Suppliers put that cargo on trucks because its cheaper, but if we can find a solution that matches trucking on cost I think we could turn Prestwick into a handling centre for Scottish produce.
“It's possible, and it has been looked at before, but probably not in any great depth, and I have opened talks with Scotland Food and Drink to see if we can work out how that might be achieved.
“It would require some investment, in terms of handling, but if we had the data to support the business case we could get freight companies interested.
“But the only way it will work is with volume, so we will have to convince the market this is viable so they will use it.”
The Scottish Government announced in June 2014 it would Invest £7 million in Prestwick to fund repairs and upgrades and has budgeted to provide Prestwick with loans of up to £25 million by the end of 2015/16 financial year, though admitted that figure may increase.
That investment, and Prestwick's ambitions to once again compete to win new passenger routes, has raised concerns among the owners of Scotland's privately-owned commercial airports.
Stewart doesn't believe Prestwick will be competing with either Glasgow or Edinburgh airports on freight, as Prestwick is already set up as an end-to-end freight mover, though he acknowledges the airport will have to innovate if it is to compete.
“From my point of view, I don't see this as us being able to offer a cheap product or lower than market price product because the government is supporting it,” he said.
“This will be a market priced product which will have to be supported by the business case: I don't see this as being a subsidised product in any way shape or form – it has to stand on its own two feet otherwise we simply wouldn't do it.”
In Stewart's view, the same rules apply with respect to winning new passenger business.
“My full remit is to cover the range of aviation revenues we can possibly generate at the airport and cargo is an area where we start from a fairly strong point already, and there is likely to be quicker wins on the cargo side than on the passenger side,” he said.
“Passenger growth is certainly a key focus, and we need to understand the needs of our potential customers so we can approach airlines to meet those needs.
“We have to get more destinations. Its what the local people need, what the airport needs and it won't succeed without that.”
Stewart knows winning new passenger business will be an uphill struggle, but he makes a compelling case for Prestwick to sit alongside Glasgow and Edinburgh Airports in meeting the needs of an increasingly mobile population.
He said: “One of Prestwick's main failings in the past 10 years was it didn't react quickly enough to the rapid reordering of the aviation industry, notably the low cost carriers who moved in to take the place of the legacy carriers.
“As those low cost carriers grew, they squeezed a lot of the regional carriers out and when they became more profitable they moved into mainstream airports and that's where Prestwick didn't react and has ended up with one carrier.
“But at the end of the day there remains a finite amount of runway capacity in Scotland and there is an increasing demand for travel.”
Stewart says there are around half-a-million people within Prestwick's immediate catchment area - North, East and South Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway – and most recent Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) figures, covering the 2013 year, show this core catchment area generated about 1.6 million trips.
He adds: “Now 1.6 million trips is a solid base on which to support regular passenger services and that is a reasonable size business for any carrier.
“Over and above that, there is what we term the floating catchment area, where we are the second closest airport – so coming into the central belt and closer to Glasgow – and there's another 1.35 million people in that area which generated 5.9 million trips in 2013.
“From our own historic data from 2013, about 50 per cent of the passengers using our airport were coming from that floating catchment area, so we can attract passengers from outwith our immediate catchment area as well.
“All of that information is going to help us to win successful bids with airlines.
“The data is there; we have significant historic data which suggests there are a lot of opportunities out there, and we also have data to suggest a west of Scotland/London link would be extremely profitable as well.
“Now the job is to convince an airline to agree with us and come in.”
Addressing concerns a publicly-owned airport could be seen to have a competitive edge over its commercial rivals – given the level of public funding already pledged – Stewart is quick to counter.
“The Scottish Government offer subsidies equally across all the airports and there is no way we can bend those rules and I'm not sure we would want to”, he said.
“There's marketing support available from the tourism industry, but in terms of subsidising flights, the same rules apply for Glasgow and Edinburgh as they do for us.
“I think we can build new passenger routes, but those will have to stand up.
“No one can build a business based on subsidies and the airlines don't want that either in the longer term.
“If a route is to be a success, it has to stack up on its own.
“We are currently doing customer surveys within our own catchment area to find out what customers want, what they want from an airline and what they want from destinations, and the information we gather will support the business case we take to a potential passenger airline.
“Travel is increasing from Scotland and we have limited runway space, and Prestwick has some significant advantages over other airports.
“We have our own railway link, and I see that as a real advantage in terms of convenience to passengers.
“We may have to innovate to attract a new passenger audience, and that may also include matching routes with rail and other transport links.”
Stewart may have only been in place in his new role a few weeks, but he is confident the airport will be demonstrating sustainable growth within a year.
He said: “Prestwick is never going to be a passenger airport in the way that Glasgow and Edinburgh are, and we have to innovative in what we can do to release its potential.
“We of course see Glasgow and Edinburgh as competition but not in the strictest sense because I think we can also compete for freight business with the likes of Newcastle and Manchester.
“We have a corporate five-year commercial plan that has been submitted to the government to return the airport to profitability or at least to break-even by year five and then returning it to the private sector.
“Within that, the executive team is developing the year by year plan on how we might achieve that.
“From my own point of view I would certainly hope within the annual report next year there will be some sustainable growth as a result of me being here focusing on the commercial side of the business, but what that looks like right now? I can't answer that.”