Projections sketched out by the airport authority years ago anticipated that a new airport with a longer runway would entice airlines to schedule bigger planes that would nearly triple that passenger number by 2018 - including some international flights.

The existing Panama City-Bay County International Airport handles 11 departures a day, with about 160,000 departing passengers a year. The airport property, northwest of Panama City, occupies just a fraction of the company’s 75,000-acre West Bay sector plan, which envisions 27,000 residential units, 490 hotel rooms, 2 marinas and 37 million square feet of commercial space that would bring tourists and entrepreneurs to the panhandle. Joe, once primarily a timber and paper company, has shifted to development and real estate, and owns hundreds of thousands of acres of land in northwest Florida.

Joe Company, the Florida developer that donated the land for the new airport and is the driving force behind the project. “Silicon Valley at one point was out in the middle of nowhere,” said Britt Greene, president and chief executive of the St. Backed by a major Florida landowner, it is part of a plan to create “a new national and international destination,” as one investor presentation proclaims, in a relatively sleepy region of beaches, barrier islands and wetlands. That is no small feat given the environmental, regulatory and financial hurdles involved in building runways and terminals, as well as community opposition to planes flying overhead.īut the airport, Northwest Florida Beaches International, is also noteworthy because it is perhaps more of a real estate project than an effort to address a pressing transportation problem. The first new international airport in the United States in more than decade is set to open in May near Panama City, Fla., a community of 37,000 people on the state’s panhandle.

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