The airport is ranked the third most-used in the state with more than 640,000 passengers in 1999, after Detroit Metropolitan Airport and Willow Run Airport, both in the southern portion of Southeast Michigan.Rice says the recent $13.25 million expansion was needed to handle more customers from northern Michigan, and a large increase in customers in northern Oakland County. The 52,000-sf addition to the 5-acre terminal was completed recently, with four new boarding gates and a new expanded waiting area.

The border between Genesee County, which holds Flint, and Oakland County, the third-richest county in the country, is exploding with new residential and commercial development. "We used to only get about 5% of our users from the southern areas, now weÕre getting about 3%," Rice says. "We had designed our last terminal expansion to last until 2001, but it just wasnÕt enough to catch up to the growth."Bonds were sold by the Bishop International Airport Authority to pay for the expansion. Northwest Airlines is the largest carrier at the airport, just as it is at Detroit Metro, where the company is more than halfway completed in building a $1.2 billion, 99-gate Midfield Terminal.