Airport Experience® News - Leadership 2022

Right: SAV Director Greg Kelly has made a name for himself on the regional and national scale due to his long-standing commitment to working for the betterment of the entire industry. At the 2022 AX Conference, Kelly (right) was in conversation with Mark Gale of Fort Lauderdale International Airport and Rick Tucker (with wife), then of Huntsville International Airport.

For more than 30 years, Greg Kelly has built his career at a single airport. S avannah-Hilton Head International Airport (SAV) was a much smaller operation when Kelly first walked through the door in 1989 as a young intern eager to learn the airport management ropes. He did that with gusto, immersing himself in myriad opportunities to learn about different facets of airport operations. He embraced the broader airport community as well, learning from them and, later in his career, sharing his knowledge with other airport executives from around the country. For SAV, the 2010s were a period of significant growth, resulting in a peak year in 2019 before the pandemic hit. Now, with the pandemic on the wane, SAV is looking again at record passenger numbers and is preparing for future growth with a new terminal expansion plan. Kelly’s positive impact on SAV and on the broader airport community in North America is broadly acknowledged throughout the industry. This year, Airport Experience News is reinforcing those widely held beliefs by designating Kelly as its Director of the Year in the small airports division. The Early Years Kelly was serving in the U.S. military in the late 1980s when airports first came on his radar. “I knew I was getting out of the military, so I’d looked at career options and decided that airport management, based on the description of the job, was where I wanted to be,” he recalls. “So, I set out to find a way to get into airport management.” He simply found the closest airport to his base at Fort Stewart Hunter Army Airfield

in Georgia, which happened to be what was then Savannah International Airport. He applied for and was granted an internship in 1989, launching what would be a robust career in airport management. “It was a two-year internship and I rotated through all the departments,” Kelly says. “They ended up deciding to keep me - I started out as a full-time manager and worked my way up. Shortly after I started, there was a new airport director, and he kind of took me under his wing. He took really good care of me and advanced me multiple times.” That former director and mentor was Patrick Graham, who put his own stamp on the airport with a 28-year tenure, most of which was spent at the director level. Kelly says that over the years, he never had the urge to jump to another airport. The fact that SAV was growing and becoming an industry leader among small airports meant there was no need to seek experience elsewhere. “It was always a new challenge with more responsibility, and in a growing, developing airport,” Kelly notes. He extols the breadth of experience he was able to gain by taking on a variety of responsibilities fairly early in his career, something that might not have happened at a larger airport. “When I arrived at SAV, the airport was starting to plan for a brand new terminal complex in an undeveloped part of the airport,” Kelly says. “For the first part of my career, I was involved in a ground-up new terminal complex with everything - an entrance road, an interchange off the interstate, parking, aviation support areas, a terminal, an apron, taxiways. For my first five years, I was heavily involved in that and got all the experience that comes with

Left: Greg Kelly, executive director, Savannah Airport Commission, is AXN’s Director of the Year in the small airports division.

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