AUBURN – A new study will look at Western Maine travelers using airports in Portland, New Hampshire and Boston to see if they might be lured to fly out of Auburn instead.

“We need to find out if there’s a market there we could tap into, one we could sustain and actually grow,” said Rick Cloutier, manager of the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport. “We need to know who might use a service if we provided it, and where they’d go.”

The airport’s board of directors plans to kick off the study with public meetings and discussions late in June, Cloutier said.

The study will try to determine if passenger travel is possible out of the municipal airport, Maine’s third busiest. Auburn-Lewiston air traffic accounts for about 10 percent of the total in Maine, according to a 2006 master plan. Maine’s air traffic is expected to increase by 40 percent over the next 20 years, and the local airport is expected to keep pace.

Cloutier expects the study to focus on why local people travel, whether it’s for leisure or business.

“That’s why we need to schedule the public meetings, to talk to business leaders and citizens and find out which routes are most popular,” he said. “And then we need to see if there is a carrier, an airline that would be willing to come up.”

The study will also look at what the airport would need to do to offer passenger service. Cloutier told Lewiston councilors last month it would take as much as $10 million in investments.

“We know we’ll need a terminal building with security and more ground personnel,” he said. “And we’ll need parking. We really have none of that now. So the idea is, we’ll be able to go to city officials and show them how much demand there is and how much we’d have to invest to get at it.”

The airport has two runways and provides landing space for commercial air traffic, including shipping and corporate travelers.

Crews finished building a parallel taxiway last summer, paid for with part of $4.5 million in federal grants. The taxiway provides a parking place for aircraft waiting to take off and gives landing aircraft a quick exit off the runway.