Slaybaugh, 55, starts on March 21 in his $124,000-a-year job as manager of Dayton International and Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport.
He fills an empty chair. New Orleans hired away his predecessor, Iftikhar Ahmad, in May 2010. In January, Ahmad’s interim replacement in Dayton, Walter Krygowski, left to join Ahmad in New Orleans.
Slaybaugh knows he will have to be a quick learner in Dayton, which competes with the Cincinnati and Columbus airports for air service and passengers.
“The first thing to try to do is maintain the service you have, and communicate to those airlines the strength they have in serving Dayton,” he said last week from Rochester. “It’s really important to make sure we’re one of the cities they’re aware of, that they understand the dynamics of our city.”
The Dayton airport’s location near the intersection of Interstates 70 and 75 has prompted a plan to extend a rail line from Vandalia onto the airport property to make it an air-truck-rail logistics hub. City officials are awaiting results of an effort by Industrial Realty Group, a redeveloper of commercial sites, to buy the largely vacant United Parcel Service-owned air freight terminal at the airport and attract new tenants to it.
Dayton completed work last year on a land-use plan that envisions development of about 650 acres of airport land.
The airport is larger than Greater Rochester International Airport that Slaybaugh managed from 1996 to 2006, but their air service is similar. Both have limited Air Canada service to Toronto. Rochester has JetBlue service, where Dayton instead has Frontier Airlines.
Still to be seen is how Southwest Airlines’ pending purchase of AirTran Airways, to be closed later this year, will affect Dayton’s service. Dayton airport officials have tried unsuccessfully for years to bring in Southwest, which flies out of Columbus and Louisville. Slaybaugh said he tried to bring Southwest to Rochester — but the airline chose to serve Buffalo instead.
Jeff Hoagland, a former Vandalia city manager who is now the Dayton Development Coalition’s executive vice president for operations, said the Dayton airport’s performance is a key for the region.
“That is a driving force out there. They have a lot of land, they have plans,” Hoagland said. “As long as they hold to their strengths and keep doing what they’re doing, I think they should be stable for the future.”
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