other ones we had to push back and focus on our workforce and getting travel reintroduced safely,' Leischner said.ĭespite a brief recovery period, the pandemic pushed passenger counts down by 80%. 'We started to have a lot of ideas teed up and to move forward with. Leischner said projects were lined up to improve the airport, and things were beginning to look up. Numbers slowly climbed and, by 2019, were up 3% compared with the year before.

He spent most of his first year absorbing details about airport operations and how it might boost the passenger load.įrom 2015 to 2017 the Moline airport had a loss of nearly 65,000 passengers annually. When he was selected, he jumped in - ready for his first job as an executive director. 'Once I started to look at the pamphlet that was put together about the community, about the airport and about the position, I, for some reason, felt that it was interesting.' 'I did not know what the Quad-Cities was,' he said. A follow-up email helped change his mind. Leischner instantly told the recruiter no and hung up. He then moved on to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where his goal was to work his way up to executive leadership.Īlong the way, he got a call, asking if he was interested in leading the Quad Cities International Airport. He took a leap of faith and worked his way up the ladder, eventually being promoted to manager. Instead, Bellingham International Airport in Washington state called, offering him a part-time position as an airport firefighter.

Originally from Oregon, Leischner worked in New York and Colorado before heading back to the northwest, where he was planning to attend law school. He began flying commercially in college but he soon found his way into the engineering side. When his twin brother went into medicine, Leischner decided he would follow his passion for aviation. 'I was torn between medicine or aviation,' he said. In school, he was considering a more clinical route.

Leischner has been with the airport since 2018, but he didn't always have his eyes to the skies. Now, Executive Director Benjamin Leischner is involving the business community to push it to the next level. The COVID-19 pandemic was particularly hard on air travel, but the airport in Moline has been slowly climbing its way back. 3-The Quad Cities International Airport has been serving the region since 1935, but there's always room for improvement, according to the executive director.

Quad. cities airport