For residents of rural western Montana, the Missoula airport serves as a key connection to the wider world. For visitors, it’s a gateway to Glacier National Park, rivers with world-famous fly fishing and many high-mountain lakes. But the current airport has undergone numerous expansions and remodels over the decades and is not equipped to handle the area’s growing passenger traffic.
“We’ve set records for the numbers of passengers each year for the past 11 years, and we reached just under a million in 2018,” says Cris Jensen, airport director for the Missoula County Airport Authority. “Then things have dropped off because of COVID-19, but we expect our numbers to come back up as things get back to normal.”