Norfolk, VA — (Feb. 26, 2025) – Anyone who has ever traveled by plane recognizes how airports and their stakeholders work together to seamlessly move travelers for business or leisure trips. What’s less understood are the many ways in which those partnerships are catalysts that support non-aviation industries, regional economic development and a community’s overall quality of life.
Throughout 2025, Norfolk International Airport will shed light on some of the less known or underappreciated aspects of what happens behind the scenes at ORF. The first of a planned series of videos branded “ORF: Airport Illustrated” is now available to view at NorfolkAirport.com.
The series’ first installment was inspired when Southwest Airlines recently honored its ORF team as Vendor Cargo Station of the Year. Thanks in large part to recurring shipments of live Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean seafood supplied by more than a dozen local vendors, Southwest’s flights leaving ORF stand out among the airline’s best performers in terms of average pounds of cargo per flight.
The airport’s Communications & Marketing team contacted Southwest corporate communications to help share this story; the airline in turn connected ORF with one of its top local cargo clients. Based in Cape Charles on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Cherrystone Aqua-Farms agreed to serve as a representative example of how live seafood is harvested and prepared for shipment by air directly to clients that distribute fresh oysters and clams to restaurants across the United States.
A recently completed economic impact study revealed ORF drove more than $2.2 billion in direct, indirect and induced spending in 2023 within Virginia and parts of North Carolina. The movement of cargo was just one element factored into that calculation. ORF’s very presence – coupled with its wide network of more than 40 nonstop air routes – enables Coastal Virginia businesses to extend their sales and distribution networks and hire more workers to meet increased demand.
