Adding flights an uphill battle for Yeager (KCRW), other small airports

Charleston's Yeager Airport is a “healthy” airport but adding more flights in the near future will be difficult.

That’s according to Michael Boyd, president of aviation consulting agency Boyd Group International, in a recent presentation to airport officials.

As far as Yeager Assistant Director Nick Keller is concerned, that’s the reality of doing business in the current airport landscape. Major airlines in the U.S. have gradually merged in recent years, leading to four dominant carriers: American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines. All but Southwest service Yeager.

“Now with the airline industry being consolidated, when we talk to an airline like Delta, who we have a good relationship with, it’s a challenge to add new flights,” Keller said.

The challenge comes from the major airlines looking to keep expenses down by offering fewer flights out of smaller airports with more passengers on board. It’s a “strategy focused on efficiency and profitability vs market share,” said an article from Governing magazine noting the trend years ago.

Keller said the current approach of airlines is “regionalization,” or funneling a smaller airport’s flights to regional hubs. Additionally, airlines are continuing to replace aircraft with larger, regional jets, according to Keller, meaning airlines need fewer flights to ferry the same amount of passengers.

This shift has contributed to the sharp drop in flights over the years for Yeager and other smaller airports, Boyd said. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Yeager had 13,115 flights in 2005, while it had just 5,661 flights in 2016.

Nationwide, there were a little more than 10 million flights recorded in 2005. That fell to around 8.2 million in 2016. It’s less steep of a decline than Yeager has experienced, but Boyd noted during his presentation that smaller airports have been hit harder than major airports at population centers.

Keller said Yeager is in good standing with the airlines it serves, but added it’s hard to convince them new flights are necessary if current flights aren’t heavily populated.

“Air services are looking to keep their costs down, so it’s not a small feat to go and ask an airline for a new flight,” Keller said.

There’s no sign an influx of routes will come to smaller airports like Yeager anytime soon in the wake of airline consolidation and “phasing out of certain regional jets,” travel publication Skift’s executive editor, Dennis Schaal, said in a recent post.

When an airport does request a new flight, airlines often look at load factors at that airport to see if it’s worth the plunge, according to Boyd. A load factor is the percentage of available seats occupied by paying customers.

In 2017, domestic flights have had an average load factor of 85.5 percent, while Yeager’s average has been 69.5 percent. Boyd said airlines typically are willing to add more flight destinations if the airport has a load factor of around 80 percent.

“Compared to most airports, load factors [at Yeager] are low,” Boyd said. “Things aren’t getting filled up right now. The air service here meets what you can support in terms of capacity and demand.”

That means Yeager would have difficulty going to an airline like American and asking for more flights, because the need isn’t apparent. Yeager has good access overall, Boyd said, but added that in an ideal situation it would have nonstop service to New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

Yeager did have nonstop service to LaGuardia until June 2013, when American Airlines dropped that service while adding a new nonstop service to Dallas. American made the move due to the lack of passengers on that service, Keller said.

“We’re used to having LaGuardia, but American said no after it was getting just 21 people per flight,” he said.

Yeager also offered nonstop Orlando flights through the low-cost airline AirTran until 2012, when Southwest Airlines acquired AirTran and discontinued the service.

Although the number of flights at Yeager has dropped the past several years, the airport did report an uptick in passengers in early 2017 at a previous board meeting. That bucked a trend of steady passenger decline that started in June 2012, in which monthly passenger numbers increased only twice until August 2016, the airport reported at the time.

Still, Yeager is an airport with good connectivity overall, according to Boyd. Keller unsurprisingly agreed with that sentiment, noting its nonstop flights to Atlanta and Washington D.C.’s Dulles and Reagan airports. The airport also celebrated its 15th anniversary of its nonstop Houston flight Thursday, the longest of its daily departures.

Keller said the airport is banking on a more expansive airport advertising campaign, the introduction of 50-seat regional jets and planned airport and runway expansions to gain further momentum.

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