Phil, thank you for coming in. Sure. It's an honor to have you here. We're going to start recording the Walker Webcast, and we're going to play this as a Walker Webcast next week. I guess I ought to do an official welcoming to Phil Washington, who runs the Denver Airport Authority after having run the Los Angeles metro system for many years. Prior to that, running Denver RTD. Phil was in Denver, then went to L.A., was extremely successful down in L.A., then came back to Denver. We are the great beneficiaries of Phil running a couple things that are just really noteworthy. First of all, it is the largest employer in the State of Colorado. It is 10% of Colorado's GDP is at DEN. 10%. Yeah. By far, the largest contributor to the State of Colorado's annual GDP is the Denver Airport. It is the third largest airport in the United States of America. It is quickly growing to become number one. With 84 million passengers in 2025? Am I correct on that? 82.4. 82.4. There we go. It's getting there. I want you to correct me on my stats here, Phil. 83 million passengers last year. Very focused on 100 million and going well beyond 100 million. 100 million by 2030? If not sooner. If not sooner. Takes getting to 105 million annual passengers to surpass Atlanta as the busiest airport in the world? Correct. Right. That's a growth trajectory that most airports, most companies would love to have in front of it. What's the biggest challenge right now as it relates to expanding DIA from 84 million annual passengers to 100 million and then on to 125 million? Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's great to have you here. Really, it's wonderful to be here with all of you. I think our biggest challenge is making sure the facilities match the growth. We're talking about an airport at DEN that was designed and built for 50- Right million annual passengers. Having to make sure that we can accommodate this tremendous growth is probably the number one thing. Also doing it safely. Safety, obviously, is our number one priority. This growth that we're seeing, not just at DEN, I mean, DEN is the fastest growing airport, I think, in the country. Also making sure that we are multimodal and making sure that it's not just about passengers. Obviously, that's our number one priority, but we want to branch out into other sectors, and hopefully, we can talk a little bit about that. The biggest thing is the modernization and keeping up with that growth, I would say. A couple things that you've done recently. First of all, to give people a sense, you have a competitive advantage because of the land you have. Yes. The airport itself is as large as the City of Miami. The City of San Francisco are two reference points as it relates to how much land you have. You have six runways. One of which is 16,000 ft long. The longest in North America. The longest in North America. Which allows any size jet to land and land comfortably. Correct. They're also wider than most landing strips, correct? Yes. All that comes into being an advantage in what way? Well, as you said, we can land any aircraft in the world right here. The land, 53 sq mi, gives us an incredible advantage in terms of development, in terms of things that we can do, and what we can accommodate with regard to development as well. It also allows us to expand our cargo operation, which is, I think, one of the huge potential avenues to bring more cargo into DEN. This land thing is incredible. It really is. There are some challenges with that as well, having all that land. You would be shocked to know that we've got a lot of wildlife out there. You've got people who jump the fence. Yes, we do. Can you talk about that at all, or is that something, because of what happened, you just have to? I don't want to ask you. Sure a question that you can't. If you say, "I can't talk about it," that's fine. No, I can talk about it. I can talk about what we've said in public. To anyone who doesn't know, an individual jumped the fence at DIA two weeks ago, ran out onto the runway, and got hit by a Frontier Flight that was taking off for Los Angeles. Was killed. It has been deemed to be a suicide. Correct. It's deemed that he did it on his own fruition. That's right. Was there purposefully, if you will? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Anything? Well, it bears mentioning that we have about 36 mi of fence, of perimeter fence. When we talk about the land that we have, it's a lot of it. Unfortunate incident. We are assessing our security right now. We always do that anyway. NTSB, National Transportation Safety Board, has an active investigation on it. It was unfortunate. I'm very concerned. I was very concerned about the passengers on that flight and concerned about our operations and maintenance people who had to clean all of that up. We had that runway back open the next morning at 10:00 A.M. after working all night to make sure that we cleaned that runway up. Safety obviously is number one. We're still working on this. We're talking to Frontier Airlines, which is our hometown airline here in Denver. We have a very close relationship with all the airlines, but especially the hometown airline here. Very unfortunate incident. Does that engine, can it be repaired, or does it have to be replaced? I am actually talking with the CEO of Frontier next week. I hesitate to say it can be repaired. tough. I mean, it's a tough thing. These engines are very resilient. You know what I mean? Yeah. There's a lot of repair that goes on with the engines and the aircraft. Our hope is that it can be salvaged. six runways, very wide, very long gets you to a flight cancellation rate that is way lower than any other major airport. You're at 0.85% of flights canceled on an annual basis last year. To give people a reference point to that, Atlanta was at about 1.5% of flights were canceled last year, and ORD or Chicago was at 1.85%. Almost 2% of their flights were canceled last year. Yeah. What does that give you as well as the airlines that fly in and out of DEN as it relates to consistency, cheaper to operate a lot of derivative effects from having that low a flight cancellation rate. It's not like the weather here is any better than it is in Atlanta or in Chicago. Is that all? Based off of the length and the width of the landing strips? I think it's some of that. It's our people too, who keep runways open, who maintain runways. We close a runway in the summer every year just to do runway maintenance. When we talk about just maintenance in general, that is a huge part of it. You mentioned the winter. We know snow here at this airport. Yeah. It's amazing that our snow crews can actually plow a runway in about 15-20 minutes with the equipment that we have. All of that plays into it. You got runway maintenance, you've got our ability to increase non-aeronautical revenue that keeps costs low for airlines. There's something called cost per enplanement. We are very low or sort of middle of the road with the large airports around the country. That means a lot because we keep airline costs low. In terms of how we handle our business and handle maintenance and financial management as well. Last year, from all three credit rating agencies, we got the highest rating in the history of Denver International Airport. All of those things kind of play into how we are attractive to airlines to come in and out of Denver International Airport. All of that plays into it. That's got to help you with your borrowing cost and your $7 billion of debt. Yes. That's right. We talked a little bit about the ability to grow the airport. You also talked about passengers. TSA wait times at DIA are shorter than they are at any of the other major airports by quite some bit. Your average wait time right now is 6-10 minutes on your TSA lines. That stacks up to 15-20 minutes at all the other majors, and some even 20-25 minutes on the TSA. How'd you pull that off? Well, a couple of things. Great on the stats, really. I happen to- That's why you're the boss and I'm here. Right. That's wonderful. I'm here. Right. That's wonderful. I'm here. Right. That's wonderful. know one or two things about aviation. I also love it. I also happen to live at DIA. Absolutely. I mean, I'm in and out of that airport all the time. Yeah. All this stuff is a big interest of mine. I point to a couple of things. One, we invested heavily in the new security equipment. We wanted to get it in as quickly as we possibly could. The biometrics that we have there, the four stations, if you will, that we have, the three or four stations that we have in one lane, has taken us from about 140 passengers per hour per lane to over 200 passengers per hour per lane. That is a big deal. I point to the technology that we have brought in on the security side. We want to do more of this. We think we can do more in terms of AI with security and different things to move folks through much faster. We were very proud of the fact, during the shutdown, that we did not have these issues in Denver that you saw in Houston and some of the other places. It's the investment that we have made in security technology that has gotten us there. We're going to do more of that. When you look at the east and west security checkpoints, we are going to have 12 additional lanes on Level 5 as well as we build out that entire terminal or great hall, if you will. I point to the technology that has helped us keep those wait times low. People get through the security, and then they go down the escalator to the trains. Yes. The trains went down over your last fiscal year 130 times. When I first read that, Phil, I was like, "Whoa, that's a lot. You're right. I read a little bit further. They went down 130 times, but for an average time of four minutes. Correct. Which gave you a redundancy rate, or the network being up 99.903% of the last fiscal year. Yes. Okay. Yes. Everyone in the telecom industry used to always say five nines. Okay. That you needed your network to be 99.99999% reliable for it to actually be a network that you would be able to go and actually sell. You're at one 9. Yeah. That's still damn good. It is, but I want 100%. Look, we need redundancy at Denver International Airport for the trains. Now, my operations folks tell me that all the time. "Hey, Phil, we got 99.86. Yeah uptime for the train." When that train is down, it's chaos at the airport. Well, you got 160,000 people a day using it, right? That's right. 160,000 people a day using it. Yeah. It's incredible. When the train goes down, the airport is eerily quiet. You ever been in a quiet airport? It's scary, actually. Yeah. We need that redundancy. I was talking to Mayor Federico Peña, Secretary Peña, not long ago. I was joking with him and with others that we must atone for what I consider the original sin of DEN, S-I-N. The original sin was not having redundancy for that train. We want to atone for that by having redundancy at the airport. Redundancy in another train or redundancy in walkways? We're looking at either or both. Actually, the train itself, how can we have redundancy from A to B to C? We have been working on that. Are you going to go from C to D? As someone who spends a lot of time in that airport, when I'm at Gate 92. Yes. That's a long way I don't mind walking long distances, it's a long way. How further can you go east-west before you go north-south? Well, a couple of things. We don't want to do a Concourse D. The reason we don't want to do a Concourse D is that is more strain on the train. For us to get to 100 million, there is an expansion that we're doing on Concourse C West. Yeah. C-West. That is the last expansion that we can do on the existing concourse infrastructure. We've already expanded all of the other concourses. In the last five years, we have built and opened 39 new gates. That's like another airport. That's like Kansas City. Anybody from Kansas City? Yeah, that's like Kansas City that we've opened. We're in Denver. We don't like people from Kansas City. I know. They got a good football team. Well, they got good barbecue ribs, too. The last expansion we can do is Concourse C West, which we have already started. That is 11 additional gates. That gets us to 100 million. Beyond that, we actually have forecast for 120 million by 2045. What we want to do is expand the terminal itself. Think about the terminal. The south end of the terminal is where the hotel is. We want to expand to the north end. There's space there to expand that with a new, what I call, a processing facility, and then have walkable concourses off that area. You can walk to the concourses that we will build off that new facility that will have airline counters and security and all of that. It's a walkable concourses with 25 gates each. We have already started sort of the pre-construction utility relocation work on the facility that we have to build first to lead to four additional concourses, two on the north end, two on the south end by the hotel. Will you charge more for those gates? Is there any difference in cost between Gate C82 and A10? We have use and lease agreements for the airlines. There's not much difference. Closer to the center core, they may be a little bit more expensive. That's typically for bigger jets, too. Correct. Right. We have international gates as well, on A, that might cost a little bit more as well. Someone brings in an Well, A380 is different because it's a double-decker, so let's just stick with one-level airplanes. Someone brings in a Dreamliner versus a 737. The 737's out on one of the far gates, the Dreamliner is on one of the close gates just because of the number of passengers. Yes. Does that airline pay more for having a bigger jet come and use that gate? There's a difference, yes. There is. Yes, absolutely. Okay. As talking about the cost of operating and why airlines like flying out of DEN jet fuel is another one. Okay. Right now, the WTI crude is trading at $100 a barrel today. A barrel of Jet A-1 is trading for $165 a barrel. To give everyone a sense of how much more refined jet fuel is than just normal crude, that shows you the price differential of a 65% premium on jet fuel. All the airlines today are trying to come to the cheapest. I pulled up Atlanta and Dallas. Okay. It didn't surprise me that Dallas was the cheapest, you're in the middle, and Atlanta is significantly more expensive on a gallon of Jet A. How do you keep your costs so low, and how do you get the fuel? Well, we have pipelines. We have fuel that's trucked in as well. It's predominantly from the pipeline that goes straight to the refinery, correct? Yes, that's right. Yeah. That's right. Well, on the cost, I think, the first thing is increasing non-aeronautical revenue as best we can. That's parking, that's a number of other concession revenue, things like that, where we can keep airline costs down. I mentioned that cost per enplanement piece, that CPE piece, where we are sort of in the middle of the pack, and that's actually a good thing. What airports are really struggling with right now is how to increase non-aeronautical revenue. I was at a conference not long ago, and we have this forum of the 100 top airports, the CEOs from 100 top airports. You go around the room, and they mention their challenges or whatever. You come up with this word salad thing. Right Every one of the predominant thing was growth, modernization, keeping costs down, and increasing non-aeronautical revenue. What we have done in a big way is the parking is our biggest revenue generator. You got 51,000 parking spaces at DIA today. Correct. About 51,000 or so. Yeah. And we also have- You going to grow that? Is that going to be 70,000? At some point, we likely will grow that, but we're also looking at what public transit can do as well. Namely the A Line. Which, happy to say, I had a part in when I was running RTD. We may have to, as these numbers grow, we may have to look at parking. We may have to look at additional parking. We'll look at that. We haven't decided on that just yet. We want to increase transit usage. Will there be new parking space in the new rental car? Yeah facility? We're looking at that. We are building a new consolidated rental car facility. We are well on our way with that. We have a professional team that's helping us with that. We're going to start design and construction. We're looking at perhaps employee parking likely on the top level of that. We're looking at about 16,000 to 18,000 spaces in that consolidated rental car facility. Quick story, though. When you look at all of that rental car space when you're driving along Peña, I was talking to one of the pioneers of building the airport, and he said, "Phil, you know that space was temporary." I thought, "Wow, temporary for 31 years?" Which, you know. One of our big priorities is to build out that space or build out that consolidated rental car facility. Really, EV chargers and all of that on our way to a zero emission airport. It'd be a great spot for a data center, except for the fact that the City Council just passed a law that says you can't put a data center in Denver. I know. County. I know. Yeah. It also, and I should mention, this ties to our efforts around energy resiliency and being energy independent. You had a blackout. You had a energy loss in March. Correct. Which was at Xcel substation. When that happened, what happens? Do you have just massive generators that kick in? I know you've got solar out there, but can you run without connection to Xcel? We do have some redundancy, but we depend on Xcel. We've got generators and all of that, but it's not optimal. When that outage happened, and we have quite a few of them as you mentioned, all the escalators and the elevators and all of that stopped at an airport. It was, again, very, very eerie. What we've done is said we want, and we've put out a request for information to the private sector on how we can be energy independent eventually. I stand by that. We cannot be down. We cannot afford to be down. No airport can afford to be down. We saw the outage in Madrid last year. Another in Heathrow last year as well. In Atlanta in 2017, they were down, like, 10 hours. Can you imagine that? We've had these outages, we went out to the private sector and said we want alternative energy options for this airport. It's like a problem statement. In college, we put out our problem statement, our challenge statement, and said, "How can we eventually be energy independent? Let's put a pathway or roadmap together to energy independence." We put out that RFI, a request for information. We got 31 proposals from all over the world on how we can do this. We would be the first airport in the world to be energy independent. We're on our way to doing that, which will bring in a whole new industry to the Rocky Mountain region. That is that multimodalism and multi-industry focus that we have. A whole energy industry we could do here at Denver. As you think about other revenue sources, first of all, revenues at DIA now are $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion? Yeah. Neighborhood, yeah. By law, you don't return any, if you will. They're not profits that come out of DIA that go to the City of Denver. It all stays at DIA, and then you continue to reinvest. Correct. We, as a community, benefit from about $40 billion of economic activity that happens around DEN. That's correct. It's not as if the City of Denver sits there and says, "Whoa, we got a windfall. You sent us a check for $300 million last year, and so we don't have to go and do X." Right? Right. Okay. That doesn't change. That's by federal law that says. That's federal law. that's federal law. You take this cashflow and just pour it back into it with the thought of being the best airport in the world, potentially the largest airport in the world, but then also bringing other economic development to the City of Denver and the State of Colorado? Yes, that's correct. Let me just put a finer point on it. We use no sales tax dollars. We are an enterprise. We actually live on what we make, to your point. Through those revenue-generating mechanisms that I mentioned. What we generate must stay at the airport. If it leaves the airport for any reason, that is called diversion of revenue. That diversion of revenue is a violation of federal law, as you mentioned. The revenue we generate, we plow back into the airport. We need to do that. We absolutely need to do that, primarily because of the growth that we're seeing. It's not just us. We're probably the fastest growing, but when you think about the 20 largest airports in this country and in the world, all of them have what's called a capital improvement program. This Capital Improvement Program, or CIP, when you hear that term, that CIP is in the billions of dollars. Yours is 12? Ours is about $12 billion over a 10-year period. I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles. LAX, theirs is something like $20-some billion. They don't have any space to grow. No, they don't. They're going to continue to go into the existing infrastructure and just upgrade the infrastructure, but they've got no ability to say, "Let's move from X number of passengers to Y," because they can't put another runway down. That's exactly right. We have this incredible benefit, this incredible resource of land here where we can spread and we can develop, and maybe we'll talk about that development piece in a minute as well. What's runway seven cost? If you just said tomorrow, "I want to go build Runway 7," what's a runway cost? Between $700 million and $1 billion. That's pretty cool. Yeah. That's a lot of money. Right. That's just grading and paving. Yeah. This thing is very deep. It's not like paving your driveway. No, I got it. I mean. On that, what about putting radiant heat underneath? Yeah could you do that? We could. There's technology out there. Are there airports that have radiant heat underneath the runways? I can't think of one right now. I think there are some. Six runways. We are doing the pre-environmental work on a seventh runway right now. There's a lot of discussion about that. What's the environmental work cost you? I'm asking this because you know my next question's going to be about the Peña Boulevard. Okay. What's the environmental cost to go? By the way, we're talking about farmland between here and Kansas. Yes. That's right. I'm a Denver resident. I like to have clean water. I like to make sure we don't have chemicals running off and into the rivers, all that kind of stuff. You're going to spend millions on an environmental impact study to try and build Runway 7 when it's farmland. Well, I've been in this role for almost five years, and the environmental contracts for the seventh runway was let before I got here. That pre-environmental was awarded about five and a half years ago, six years ago. To do a pre-environmental study? Environmental overall. Yeah. Okay. We're still in the pre-environmental stage, but that contract was let for all of the environmental for a seventh runway. That's being done. The issue is, and what we've run into from various stakeholders is, namely the airlines, is are you fully optimizing the six runways you have? Therefore, do you need a seventh runway? What I've said and what we've said is that once we go over 100 million, in order to sustain or even go beyond 100 million, we need a seventh runway. Because of the rate of departures and takeoffs and all of that. We know at some point, with forecasts for 2045 of 120 million, we're going to need a seventh runway. Talk that through for a second as it relates to everyone in this room has flown in and out of DIA. My understanding is that the slope that your jets come in is at the exact same slope at every single 3%, which is the same at every major airport. You can only have two coming in simultaneously and two taking off simultaneously. Is that correct? If you added a seventh, you could actually add a third inbound or a third takeoff? I believe we could, yes. Really? We could do that. Is there any other airport that's done that where they got three jets taking off simultaneously or landing simultaneously? I don't know of any. I don't know of any right now. Keep in mind that geographically, we have wind conditions and all that, so we change runways all the time based on wind conditions and all of that. You don't have to worry about any buildings. No, we don't. any noise ordinances. As a result of that, you have a massive advantage. Well, I would say we don't have to worry about noise. Really? We have a 1988 intergovernmental agreement with Adams County that talks a lot about noise and measuring noise and all of that. We're always concerned about noise. It's inevitable at an airport, though. I wouldn't say we don't worry about that. We do. We're very concerned about that in many ways. Wow, that's surprising. You've got, I think, 350 mi of roads out there. Yeah if you add it all together. That's from DC to Boston of continuous roads that you've got to maintain. Yes. You've also got more snowfall than any other major airport. You and I have talked about this before. Yes. What do you do with all that snow? Well, hopefully it melts. You've got a melter. Yes. We got a melter. We've done very well with snow management, if you will. That adds big environmental issues to it, right? It does. It all gets melted, and then what happens to the water? Does it get recycled? Does it go to the rivers? Yes. We look to retain and capture all of the water. We look to retain and reuse the de-icing fluid and all of those things. That's sustainability piece that we have. We look to capture and recycle as much water as we possibly can, and I think we do a pretty good job of it. Is there anything that doesn't meet the eye that goes on at DIA? For instance, you've got like one of the things that I looked up was, first of all, you've got a jail there. Yeah. Hopefully, nobody in this room knows what the jail at DIA looks like. Yeah. We got a morgue there, too. You got a morgue there, too. Oh, yeah. How many passengers a year die on an airplane and end up at DIA to be taken care of? Back of the envelope. Oh, man. A year? I don't know. Probably 10 or below. Yeah. It's not as rare as you think. We have a lot of emergencies on aircraft. We have a lot of emergencies, and not deaths fortunately. Right. We take care. In the concourses, in the terminal, we have a lot of medical emergencies. You have the largest service dog training facility in the State of Colorado. Yeah. Why is that? The CATS program, the K9 program, is really a fantastic program. Keeps people calm. This whole idea of neurodiverse and all of that, people get nervous when they fly. The K9 program, the CATS program, really, you would be amazed. When we bring all those dogs, those K9 in, it really calms a lot of people down, especially kids. Seniors as well. That is one of our great programs. People that own these K9s that bring them in, I'm forever grateful to them that bring in their dogs. They got to pass a test. We don't have any rottweilers or anything in that K9 program. As it relates, all of us look at Instagram and we see all these very sad kind of road rage that happens inside of the cabin of airplanes. I just last night happened to see one of a Southwest Airlines. Really? fight between two women. It just came up and I was like I don't need to see that. That happens. How often do your either EMTs or law enforcement get called out to a plane to take care of what I would call road rage, would be what I'd call it even though it's plane rage? Yeah. Plane rage, air rage. It happens, I won't say frequently, but we- That's reassuring. I thought you were going to say it happens more than I thought. No. It happens occasionally, I will say, where we have a disturbance on an aircraft. We have a fair number of planes that are sent to DEN for various reasons. It might be a disturbance in the air, it might be a medical emergency. They are diverted to DEN. I think a lot of that happens when they're sent to us, is because they know that our teams are very proficient, both our medical teams, both our fire department there. We pay for those services from downtown as well, police and fire and all of that. We pay the city for that, by the way. I think many of these are referred to DEN because they know we have the personnel to handle pretty much any situation. When you have police, you have paramedics y ou have gate agents, you have pilots, you have passengers, you have caterers, you have fuel. 40,000 people working in this ecosystem. Yeah. They're not all your employees. Correct. How do you manage the access/safety component? When they all have access to your facility and are all participating there, but if some, let's just say Southwest Airlines gate agent decides that he or she doesn't want to act the way that they're supposed to act in going to the gate, in being engaged with a flyer who may or not be flying with Southwest, how do you deal with that? Well, I think the first thing is creating a culture within the entire ecosystem. Even though we don't handle everyone, we're not responsible for everyone, I think that we can really lay out a vision of safety and excellence and all of those things, and create that culture ecosystem-wide. We've done that. We meet with the airlines once or twice a month as a sort of a consortium of all the airlines. We talk about this culture thing, we talk about safety, we talk about all these things. The airlines, they handle their business as well. Airline employees, the example that you gave. All of the vendors, the concessions, and all of these folks out there, I want to think that they understand what the culture is and what the vision is of the airport itself, and I think they adhere to it. That's not to say we don't have issues. We do. I think for the most part, everyone understands that we need to run a good ship, and we have done that. United has 90 gates at DIA. They do, yeah. Mm-hmm. Southwest has, like, 40. Yeah. Is there a person at United who sort of is the station manager? Yes of everything that goes on at DIA? Yes. You call him or her and say, "Hey, we got an issue," or they call you and say. We were on gate 820 and something's not happening. Absolutely. We talk to those station managers on a daily basis. You mentioned United. They have a wonderful lady who is the station manager. Great professional. We talk to her frequently. Again, probably almost every day. The same thing with all of the other airlines. We meet as a group at least once a month. I'm in that meeting. Several other folks from our team are in that meeting. We work through these issues. If we have an incident, we talk about the lesson learned, we talk about the after-action review that we do. It works. It's a big ecosystem, and people find it hard to imagine how we control all that. We've got good people there at the airport that help us do that. I was looking at what your biggest city pairs are. I was surprised that Phoenix is your largest city pair. Then it goes Phoenix, Vegas, I believe, then Dallas. Dallas L.A. Yes. Sounds about right. I was surprised about those. I think about this being a regional hub. People coming in here and then going off to places like Boise that don't have a whole lot of direct access. All four of those airports are major international airports. They've got lots of international flights coming into them. That surprised me that those were your biggest city pairs. I guess the question would be, how much are you working on getting flights from Asia to fly over San Francisco, fly over L.A. Come to Denver to then allow passengers. Yeah to spread out into the United States? Because your number one international destination is Cancún. Yes. Which is just Denverites going to Cancún or someone from Boise who comes through here to go to Cancun. That's not necessarily someone in Tokyo saying, "I'm going to New York, and I'm not going to go direct to New York. I'm going to go to Denver and transfer across. What's the opportunity there? Well, I think what we bill ourselves, what we've been saying over the last five years is that we are the gateway to the West. In my mind, it's not just about Denver. The gateway to the West is come into Denver, catch that connecting flight to Phoenix or wherever. We have been sort of promoting ourselves that way internationally. We have been very, very aggressive over the last five to six years on international. We believe that with the rise of the middle class in Asia, in Africa, that travel We're already seeing the growth. We have taken delegations to the continent of Africa. We are really targeting the continent of Africa. We actually went to Addis, Ethiopia. Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Took a delegation there and met with the government because Ethiopian Airlines is owned and managed by the government of Ethiopia. Met with the Prime Minister there about a flight from Addis to Denver. There are some challenges with that. Addis is actually a higher elevation than Denver. We would have to take off from here with a less than full tank because of the weight- Right that is involved with that. I see tremendous growth on the continent of Africa. Asia as well. Quick story. I was in Istanbul about a year ago. We were in a setting like this. We had a delegation that went there because we got a direct flight, Turkish Airlines. The gentleman from the Chamber of Commerce came in and said, "We don't aspire necessarily to a big house like Americans do and the picket fence and all of that. We aspire to travel." We're not so much concerned with maybe how Americans think about a house and all of that, because what he said was, "We can't afford it, but we want to travel, and our children want to travel." I thought, you know what? That's pretty incredible to me, and we need to put Denver on the map, if you will, and not just have it as a flyover city. That is why this whole idea of economic development and us being a generator of $47 billion a year, whatever it is, it really boils down to what's happening here in Denver that people want to come to, and the West. All of these things the city government is doing and the mayor is doing and all of that really ties into the potential that we have for folks to come here from all over. Are you talking about flights from Africa or from the Middle East? You won't make it from the Middle East. That's too far right now. Yeah. From Asia and from Europe. What about space? Could DIA ever be a landing pad for people who go up to space and come back to space, given you got long runways, you got runways that have very, very sturdy runways below them, and you're pouring concrete down. How deep is that concrete? Is it 6 ft? Yeah, it's at least 6 ft. Really? Yeah. Wow. Have you guys thought about space? We have. We actually have. Listen, we got a spaceport within 5 mi of the airport, right? We meet with the folks from spaceport all the time. I absolutely believe that we are in the best position of any airport in this country to have space travel from. We got to build the infrastructure and all that, but I think that we're so well-suited. We talked about the land that we have, and we talked about the space that we have to build. We haven't talked too much about the opportunities for development that we're doing right now, but I absolutely believe, when I think about 20, 30, 40 years from now, DEN is the launching pad. It's the launching pad. You think about that in the context of SpaceX and Tesla- how Elon Musk S-1 on SpaceX came out yesterday. That gives lots of insight into what the SpaceX IPO is going to look like. In it, one of the things that I thought was so interesting was the fact that Elon has these two ecosystems between Tesla and everything that's in Tesla, and SpaceX and everything that's SpaceX, and it's all co-mingled. You got SpaceX buying the Tesla SUVs, right? You've got all of these different companies are interacting with each other. Yeah. You're sitting here saying, we're positioned as potentially the best airport. Yes to try and attract space activity, and yet the Denver City Council yesterday banned the development of data centers. You think Elon Musk comes to Denver? What I will say from an infrastructure standpoint, what I feel our team's job is to prepare the way. I am not, of course, an elected official and so hopefully. No, I'm trying to push you on this one. Yeah. I'm an infrastructure guy. I was an infrastructure guy since I was a kid, you know what I mean? I was just like, when my mother worked 14 hours a day, and wondered when the next bus would come as we lived in public housing, my mom was a single mother, I was enamored with infrastructure for the good of humanity. I'm talking about infrastructure, I'm talking sidewalks, water, transit, and all of that. We want to do what we can in our foxhole, if you will, to show that we can prepare the way in terms of infrastructure for anything that we can dream of. When I think about space, I think about what do we need to do at Denver International Airport to prepare that facility with the hope that the politics will follow. Right? Is it too much to ask for the politics to lead? I think so. Fair answer. I think so. I'm not talking about just here. Yeah. I'm talking about just nationally. I think that if I think about how I can prepare the way, and I think about all these things, I think about that we've talked about. I think about energy independence, pave the way for that, whether that is geothermal, whether that is Small Modular Reactors that I get beat up on. You did. I stand by it, though. Absolutely. How much would a small scale reactor to be able to give you enough energy cost? Well, I think right now, about the need to run or have energy and electricity 24/7, seven days a week or whatever. It's not just SMRs, it's a combination of all these things. Could you do it on just SMRs? I think eventually we will be able to. Do you have any idea what that would cost? I don't know. Right now, it costs too much to do that right now. I'm looking down the road. Even with you having a $12 billion capital campaign right now. It's bigger than that. Yes, I think so. I think so. These things are expensive now. SMRs, there's no real. Could you pull it off? active solar or the storage doesn't allow you to do it? I think solar, I don't think we have enough solar to do that. Even though we have more solar arrays and we have probably the largest solar farm of any airport in this country. Right we can't do it just on solar. I think we're going to need a little bit more. I'm not just stuck on SMRs. I think we can do this across the board. I think we can do a combination of various alternative energy options to get us where we want to go. Independence energy independence. Final couple of questions. I talked earlier about the environmental impact study on Runway 7. Yeah. You've got an environmental impact study going on on the widening of Peña Boulevard. Of all the bottlenecks, you've gone. You've changed the TSA lines and brought it down to the best in the country. You've got your canceled flights down at the best in the country. You've got more growth than any other airport in the country, and yet Peña Boulevard is still two lanes out and two lanes back. To anyone who goes out there all the time, sits there and says, "Why am I waiting longer to get my car out there than I am to get through security into my gate? Exactly. Are we going to get some relief here? Absolutely. Listen, we are talking about improving Peña. Well, that's just widening it, isn't it? We cannot predetermine the outcome during the environmental period. Actually, that's against the law. I have my ideas, but this is why we're going through that environmental process. This is a $12 million environmental impact study? I forget how much it is. I believe it's $12 million. It's probably, yeah. To figure out whether a swallow is going to have its migratory pattern changed by us adding two more lanes to Peña Boulevard? Yeah. We are looking to accelerate that environmental process as best we can, but we've got to go through it. You want to make a bet? We've got to do it. you want to make a bet with me that you've got a fix to your duality on the trains before Peña gets widened? No, I'm not going to bet. I'm not going to bet. I will tell you this, we are scheduled to get to what's called a preferred alternative by the end of this year. The preferred alternative says this is what we want and plan to do. You've got to go through this community thing and all of that, right, which we're nearing the end of. At the end of this year, we're going to come out with that preferred alternative. Widening is one of the alternatives that we are out there shopping. Sorry, what would be something else? I can't remember all the alternatives. Double decker? No. I'm trying to figure out. No double decker. what the alternative beyond just widening it is. Isn't it just widening it? Well, there's a couple. There's the widening. I'll come back to you with the other ones. There's a transit element that we're doing too. We've got 20 recommendations for what's called transportation demand management, 20 recommendations that we can improve the transit side. People don't realize that we own Peña, the airport does, and we're responsible for maintaining it. To your point, the fact that Peña has not changed in 31 years, it's about time that we do something about it. We are. We're at the end of that environmental period. Here's a bet I'll make with you. Great. I'm not sure I'll take it, but you put it out there. I bet that there will be a lot of consternation with whatever preferred alternative we come up with. People might just say, "That's great, Phil." Listen, it's something that we need to do. We've had to explain to people that we cannot go from 50 million annual passengers, airport designed for 50, to 100 and not do something about Peña. 100%. Yeah. Just like we're doing with all this other stuff, right? We're doing the consolidated rent-a-car facility. We are looking at a seventh runway. We're building the north terminal expansion to get us to 120. We are expanding Concourse C to the west to get us to 100 million. We're doing all this sustainability things, alternative energy options, all of this. We've got to focus on the road that gets us to the airport. I'm happy to say, over the last four or five years, we have done that, and we're nearing the end of it towards the end of this year where we are going to announce that preferred alternative. As I was getting myself ready for all this and looking at all the stats, I looked at what impact what you manage has on this state, and I said it at the top. It's got tens of thousands of employees, the largest employer in the State of Colorado. It's got 10% of the state's GDP company or government service that has that much of a contribution to our state's GDP. It's innovating and it's growing faster than almost anything else, and you run it. I was sitting there saying, "Is Phil the most important person in the State of Colorado? I will tell you're damn close to it. The governor may have more sway over an overall GDP growth and where he puts his finger on the scale to say, "That needs to grow," or, "That doesn't," or, "We're going to invest there." Barring the governor, I don't know someone else who I could've had to this conversation who has a bigger impact on growth and the GDP of the State of Colorado. Thank you for all you do. Thanks for answering all of my very detailed questions. I love what you do. I love flying in and out of your airport, and I really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Thank everyone that's here or online or whatever, thank you for being just such a supporter of Denver International Airport and aviation and transportation. Yeah. Phil has the one drawback of knowing me as well as I know Phil, is that he gets these texts from me at random times that say like, "I've been waiting for 32 minutes for my bag. I know. It hasn't shown up on Carousel 5. I know. He's like, "It's coming, really. I've got the team on it. It's all good. I remember that. Yeah. Well, that was Actually, I'm not, as I hope everyone in the room and who's watching this knows, I don't do that. What I did do once was I was coming back through the international terminal literally the baggage carousel I know. exploded. That was terrible. Literally exploded in front of me. I texted Phil and I said, "I'm at baggage Carousel 1 in the international terminal, and the thing literally just exploded." He's like, "Thank you very much. We're on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not quite as bad as my bags are taking me a long time. The whole thing had blown up. Well, what's funny about that, what you didn't know was that I was on an international flight right behind you. Yeah. Was it fixed by the time you got there? No. I had just landed and I was behind you on another flight, and I walked in and saw that. Our folks, I texted, our folks were working on it when I got to the international carousels. That's great. So. Phil, thank you so much. It's been great. It's been a great conversation. It's been great. Thank you all. Thank you.