Concerns for new airline remain

Concerns over the airline set to serve the Imperial Airport continue in the El Centro City Council, and as the council prepares to formally discuss SeaPort Airlines and its route in its next meeting, the airline is postponing its starting date.

SeaPort Airlines, chosen by the Department of Transportation to serve the county’s subsidized airport, postponed its starting date from March 1 to May 1. When winning the contract, SeaPort displaced SkyWest, which will continue servicing the airport through that time, according to airport and SeaPort officials.

“We had a little setback with the fees in San Diego,” said Geoff Dale, SeaPort’s Southwest regional manager. Dale, also an Imperial city councilman, explained that based on a formula the San Diego airport uses, the monthly rent initially thought to be around $9,000 was actually about $28,000. “(But) all this is being worked out,” said Dale, who reassured that SeaPort will start servicing Imperial County in May. Dale also said on Thursday that SeaPort will fly to Burbank after the first month in service. In addition, SeaPort will base its airplanes and its pilots here and work toward increasing the number of enplanements to 10,000 per year so the airport gets its grant funding, he said.

In 2012, the airport had 5,500 enplanements, said airport Manager Sandy Gutierrez. She said it’s critical to increase enplanements to keep the $1 million in grants the airport gets.

Meanwhile, the El Centro City Council agreed on Tuesday to formally discuss the new route that city officials like Councilwoman Cheryl Viegas-Walker and many in the community have questioned.

Concerns over SeaPort’s route gained momentum when the federal government decided not to go with SeaPort’s offering of 17 weekly roundtrips to San Diego and 12 weekly round trips to Burbank airport, north of Los Angeles. Instead, the DOT went with the cheaper option, which is five flights to San Diego commuter terminal every day during the week, and five flights during the weekend in a nine-seat plane.

When told about the Burbank option being added to the route, El Centro Mayor Ben Solomon said concerns still remain and noted the goal of the council is to have flights into the Los Angeles International Airport.

“But if that can’t be, this get us closer,” said Solomon, adding that LAX provides more connections than San Diego and that arriving at Burbank still means that there is another stop before one can arrive to LAX.

Solomon also said that El Centro City Council will have Dale come to the council’s next meeting, “so we can express our concerns to him.”

In an interview Wednesday, Viegas-Walker said the main concern is “the limited, limited, limited option of flying us to the commuter terminal in San Diego … and people (have) said, ‘if I’m going to fly out of San Diego, I’m going to drive and I’m going to fly out of the main terminal,’ so this gives us nothing in terms of greater access to other destinations.”

Dennis Logue, the local network volunteer with the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, said another big complaint in the community is that SeaPort won’t transfer luggage and that people would have to go through security twice.

“I really don’t know if that’s sure or not, it depends on how San Diego sets it up,” said Logue, who also noted that as far as the postponement “it’s seems we are pretty far down the road for something that was supposed to start next month … pretty far down the road for these guys not (knowing) all this.”

And yet, Logue also said that although San Diego doesn’t have the number of connections LAX has, having the San Diego route provides a lot of flexibility for local trips. Moreover, “it could be fun if the rates are low enough we could have people doing the weekends in San Diego ... there are some opportunities there.”

“But the biggest thing for everybody to remember before everybody gets really angry is that it’s a two-year contract,” said Logue. “Everybody needs to take notes and figure out what they like and what they don’t like and when the contract starts to come up again, which will be in a year … that’s when everybody needs to sit down and start talking about what worked and what didn’t work.” 

Source:  http://www.ivpressonline.com