The airport is ranked the third most-used in the state with morethan 640,000 passengers in 1999, after Detroit Metropolitan Airportand Willow Run Airport, both in the southern portion of SoutheastMichigan.Rice says the recent $13.25 million expansion was neededto handle more customers from northern Michigan, and a largeincrease in customers in northern Oakland County. The 52,000-sfaddition to the 5-acre terminal was completed recently, with fournew boarding gates and a new expanded waiting area.

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