From the Cockpit with GSP’s Tom Tyra and Kelly Wiggs

Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport regularly sees high volumes of automotive shipments from across the world. Connected to Charlotte (CLT) and Atlanta (ATL) by major highways and to the seaport in Charleston, S.C., by rail, Greenville-Spartanburg (GSP), in Greer, S.C., positions itself as an alternative hub for freighter operators looking for fast, customizable solutions. [caption id="attachment_57298707" align="aligncenter" width="1672"] Kelly Wiggs, GM of airline services at Cerulean Aviation, left; Tom Tyra, VP and chief marketing and communications officer, right. (Courtesy/GSP)[/caption] Cargo Facts sat down with Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Tom Tyra and Kelly Wiggs, general manager of airline services at GSP’s wholly owned handling division, Cerulean Aviation, during a recent site visit to discuss the airport’s regional and global position in the freighter segment. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Cargo Facts : GSP’s cargo business has grown significantly since it began in 2016. Tell us about GSP’s cargo development over the last decade. Tom Tyra: Cargo operations launched in 2016 with the goal of serving an auto manufacturer in the community. The first freighter to arrive regularly was a 747. We learned the cargo business very quickly and opened a 110,000-square-foot facility at the end of our runway just three years later. That expansion also included a 17-acre ramp that could park three 747s simultaneously. By 2021, we were already well underway with a 50,000-square-foot expansion of our facility. We also doubled the size of our ramp, so now we can park six 747s. We’re kind of the best of all worlds because we can handle any aircraft shipping any item. The beauty of where GSP is located in upstate South Carolina is that we are one of the fastest-growing economies both in the Southeast and across the country. CF : Along which lanes is GSP seeing the most freighter growth? TT: We’re heavily influenced by cargo moving in and out of Europe. We have some very large auto manufacturer partners nearby that have operations in Europe. Right now, Liege [LGG in Belgium] is our biggest airport partner. We’re also partnered with Hahn [HHN in Germany] and others. We are a secondary — or alternative — airport working with other alternative airports and we can give value to shippers who usually rely on more congested hubs like Miami (MIA) or Chicago (ORD) by offering custom solutions and the full focus of our entire team. CF: How would you describe GSP’s vision for attracting widebody freighter operations and what steps are you taking to turn attraction into regular operations? TT: We have the facilities many secondary airports don’t have. ... We have U.S. Customs on-site. You’re working directly with the airport in handling your flights — not a tenant of the airport. The challenge we’ve had is that a lot of carriers — even though they get frustrated with large hub operations — are traditional. Large hubs are what they know. We need to give these carriers good experiences so that they start talking to each other about us. Kelly Wiggs: It’s building awareness. When we show them that we have the space, how organized we are, how clean we are, how we’re able to dedicate a space to a real design build process, they won’t go anywhere else. CF: Is it the goal of GSP to stay within this niche of being customizable? KW: The customers we have now like to do a lot of the service themselves and that does require a dedicated facility. But even if you had a freight forwarder that wanted to come in here [and] doesn’t want any facility and wanted us to do everything, we have that ability. We have the space to do that. TT: We’re never going to become an ATL or an ORD. So much of that is built on the bellyhold of the passenger aircraft that are going all over the world. The demand for passenger aircraft at GSP will continue to grow — and our region is growing by leaps and bounds — but it will never become even a CLT. At GSP, we can scale up and keep the same high level of service that we have. We can double or more what we do today while maintaining that service level. We can get a lot bigger, but we need to do it in a way so that we don’t lose track of what got us here. Cargo Facts Symposium 2026, the premier event for the freighter aircraft and air cargo industries, will take place in Nashville, Tenn., on Oct. 21-23. Find out more and register by Sept. 4 to take advantage of early-bird pricing.

From the Cockpit with GSP’s Tom Tyra and Kelly Wiggs

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