Travelers prepare for boarding at Redmond Municipal Airport. 06/17/25 (Dean Guernsey/The Bulletin)

Inside the Redmond Airport terminal, space is hard to come by.

“It’s really crowded today,” said Chrissy Johnston on a recent Tuesday afternoon. Johnston flies from Newark, New Jersey through Denver to Redmond several times a year to visit her son, who lives in Bend. “There wasn’t a lot of seating,” she said. “We couldn’t sit at the bar or restaurant. We had to go to the lounge area, and even that was packed.”

That scene has become all too familiar at the Redmond Airport, where the number of passengers has doubled in the past 10 years, mirroring — and propelling — growth of the region.

“All of a sudden a lot of people want to come here,” Johnston said.

But the airport is about to get a lot bigger.

After years of planning, construction broke ground Wednesday on a three-year, $180 million terminal expansion project to add 80,000 square feet of new space, including a brand new concourse, seven new jet bridges, expanded waiting areas, new concessions and more than double the seating.

Officials view the expansion as much more than just extra space and seating, rather a long-term investment in the future of Central Oregon travel and economic development.

The project will be large enough to address the airport’s top problem — overcrowding in waiting areas — for roughly the next 20 years, said Zachary Bass, Redmond Airport manager. Ticketing, baggage claim and other areas will still need to be expanded in the future, Bass said.

The airport projects that by 2036 more than 1.7 million passengers will be flying through Redmond each year.

But the airport is no stranger to soaring above those forecasts.

Seven years ago, the airport thought it would reach about one million passengers by 2036. It has already eclipsed that mark, serving 1.2 million passengers last year. The airport is now serving twice as many passengers per year than it was in 2016.

The airport looks at employment numbers, tourism and growth trends and airline data to make projections. The estimates are generally conservative to account for unforeseen blows to air travel, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Historic trends indicate that filling up the new airport likely won’t be a problem.

“If we’ve learned anything from watching the airport over the last 20 years, it’s probably just going to keep growing,” said Deschutes County Commissioner Phil Chang, who serves on the city of Redmond’s airport committee.

Redmond hosts five airlines with service to 13 cities. In the last few years flights have been added to Dallas, Texas and Burbank Sonoma and Palm Springs, California, with flights to Portland and Las Vegas returning after the pandemic.

The expansion is partially about competing with other airports to draw new air service. Bass said he recently returned from meetings in Indianapolis, where he goes a handful of times each year to build relationships with airlines. Bass said the airport has room for one more airline, but wouldn’t be able to add any more without the expansion.

“It’s not ‘if you build it they will come,’ it’s ‘if you don’t build it, they can’t come,’” Bass said.

From airfield to regional hub 

At a construction groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday, attendees included relatives of the man credited with establishing Redmond as the aviation center of Central Oregon.

American Legion posts were responsible for carving out the earliest airfields into the High Desert, but it was store owner J.R. Roberts, the namesake of Roberts Field at the Redmond Airport, who helped land the funding as the federal government sought to set up an air service in Central Oregon.

Before that, Bend and Redmond butted heads over their budding airports as neither city agreed to partner on an airfield on land between them proposed by county commissioners.

A hint of that rivalry still exists.

“The airlines always called it Bend-Redmond, which was a little annoying,” said Redmond Mayor Ed Fitch.

The Redmond airport was allotted federal funds in the years after the Great Depression, enough to extend and gravel the runways. That was enough for an early airline, Oregon Airways, to take notice and expand its passenger and freight service to Redmond.

WWII would lead to major upgrades for the Redmond Airport. Roberts saw the writing on the wall and prepared staff and space for a pilot training program. After the Peal Harbor bombing in 1941, the federal government awarded $500,000 for paved runways, lighting, shops and hangars.

The base was returned to the city of Redmond after the war, now ready to handle commercial air traffic, which began in 1946.

There were several terminal expansions in the coming decades, with a $12 million expansion project coming in the early 1990s, increasing the size of the terminal nearly threefold, from 8,000 to 23,000 square feet, which would eventually attract a third airline.

An article that appeared in The Bulletin at the time called that project “an effort to transform the Redmond airport from a small town airfield to a full-fledged regional air terminal.” The airport’s most recent expansion in 2008 brought the terminal to 130,000 square feet.

A key driver of growth

The new expansion is paid for with about $45 million in federal funds, $90 million in bonds and airport revenues, $10 million in state grants and $35 million in airport cash. The city is not levying any additional taxes to pay for the project.

According to Bass, the Redmond Airport retains 86% of air travelers in Central Oregon, with most of the rest driving to Portland to fly.

John Stark, CEO of Economic Development for Central Oregon, a regional economic development agency, said in a statement the Redmond Airport is a “key asset to the growth and sustainability of our Central Oregon economy.”

“It connects our region to national and international markets, enabling local companies to distribute their products efficiently, meet with suppliers, partners and customers across the country, and attract new business opportunities. It also supports a thriving tourism industry that brings in significant outside revenue, helping sustain jobs and services throughout our communities,” Stark said.

The agency is part of what’s called the Central Oregon Air Service team, a group of business and tourism groups that help guide the growth of the airport.

Regional airports in Western outdoor towns like Bend and Redmond are blurring lines between rural and urban areas, said Ray Rasker, former executive director of the research group Headwaters Economics, based in Bozeman, Montana. He co-authored a study called “The Economic Importance of Air-Travel in High-Amenity Rural Areas.”

Airports have created “connected” counties — those where the effects of geographic isolation from metropolitan areas have been erased by airports. Local economics no longer have to rely on just natural resources, agriculture and tourism.

“Suddenly, you start behaving like a big city,” Rasker said.

The public will soon be able to watch a live stream of the Redmond Terminal Expansion project by visiting flyrdm.com/terminal-expansion/, as well as a virtual tour of the new airport.