When a city gets added air service it must use it or loose, consultant says

That was the driving point made at this year’s Regional Air Service Luncheon during a presentation by Jeffrey Hartz, a senior consultant with Madison, Wis.-based Mead & Hunt, who advises airports across the country on air service development.

“The success with the current destinations leads to more growth, to more service, to more potential; and, at the end of the day, air service breeds economic growth,” he said during the Aug. 20 event at the Grand Wayne Center co-hosted by the Fort Wayne-Allen County Airport Authority, Greater Fort Wayne Inc., and the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership.

“Businesses decide to come in and move to a community where they can get to where they need to go. And people want to stay in a community when you can have that much more growth.”

The region can be proud of the air service carriers have added and committed to add to Fort Wayne International Airport in recent years, and residents need to support it to keep it, Hartz said.

Allegiant Air added non-stop service out of FWA to Phoenix-Mesa last October, which helped boost the airport’s boarding numbers and, this October, Fort Worth, Texas-based American Airlines Group will add two eastern U.S. destinations.

US Airways Express – which became part of American in December – will begin Oct. 2 offering two daily flights between FWA and Philadelphia International Airport and a once-daily flight between Fort Wayne and Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina.

An additional connecting flight to United Airlines in Chicago began April 1, bringing the number the SkyWest Airlines commuter service flies out of Fort Wayne to four. And in September, FWA will get a fourth connecting flight to Delta Air Lines in Atlanta.

Delta replaced a 50-seat regional jet with a 76-seat regional jet in July for its midday Flight 4952. The larger regional jet has a dozen first class seats which are larger and provide more legroom.

Gaining 26 seats on the midday flight is important because demand is high for service to and from Atlanta. The fourth flight added on Sept. 2 between Atlanta and Fort Wayne will use a 50-seat regional jet.

In addition to Allegiant, FWA has flights on American to Dallas and Chicago, United to Chicago, Delta to Detroit and Atlanta, and on a seasonal basis in the summer to Minneapolis. FWA travelers can get to 349 destinations with a single connection.

Acquisitions can present opportunities to develop new business and cut costs but American’s acquisition of U.S. Airways is not expected to eliminate a hub, Hartz said.

Among the most obvious business opportunities to consider is the addition of service to a U.S. Airways hub out of cities where that carrier had no or little presence but American was doing very well, he said.

Those cities included Fort Wayne; Evansville; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Lexington, Ky.; Memphis, Tenn., and Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Okla.

Of those, only Fort Wayne and Grand Rapids will add two U.S. Airways hubs; the rest will add only one. Memphis is the only city in the group that already has service to a U.S. Airways hub, at Charlotte.

Establishing a revenue guarantee pool is a key to attracting additional scheduled service for Fort Wayne, as is increasing the number of passengers boarding commercial flights at FWA. While airports at cities of a similar size saw a downward trend in their figures, FWA saw success in both areas during the past couple years, Hartz said.

The $2-million revenue guarantee pool was established with a Small Community Air Service Development Grant to support the service to Philadelphia, said Scott Hinderman, executive director of airports for the Fort Wayne-Allen County Airport Authority.

Matching funds were required to obtain the $600,000 grant. Making it possible were commitments of $50,000 from the Regional Partnership, $100,000 from Indiana Economic Development Corp., $150,000 from Allen County, $500,000 from Greater Fort Wayne and $600,000 from the City of Fort Wayne.

The airport reported about 298,660 passengers boarded flights at the airport last year, which was up 5 percent from the previous year and 7.5 percent from 2011.

If Allegiant boardings were subtracted from the totals, the airport still would have seen an increase in boardings from 2012 to 2013, but it would have been less than 1 percent.

Many of the cities Fort Wayne is compared with have Allegiant service but have not seen it expanded in recent years, said Scott Hinderman, executive director of airports for the Airport Authority.

Between 2010 and 2014, the average number of weekly seats in the Fort Wayne market grew 42 percent, while seats shrunk 5 percent on average for other non-hub markets and 6 percent for small-hub markets during the same period, Hartz said.

“That’s a real win and that’s a real show of how supportive the community is and how far the airport’s been working with the local community to grow that when so many markets have been shrinking and some of them have been shrinking out of existence as service has literally ceased to exist in a lot of markets,” he said.

Due to the addition of eastbound routes in October, American will become the largest carrier in terms of the number of seats flying out of FWA.

That is good for Fort Wayne travelers connecting at American hubs, Hartz said, because the carrier is in the process of replacing old MD-80 jets with new jets from Airbus’ A319 and A320 family and from Boeing’s 737-800 and 777 family as a result of a huge order announced in 2011.

Fort Wayne also stands to benefit from the fact that American is in the process of replacing smaller regional jets at its hubs with larger regional jets that came with the U.S. Airways acquisition, he said.

American also placed an order in December for 90 Bombardier CRJ900 and 60 Embraer E175 regional jets, which Hartz said could benefit Fort Wayne. The jets seat 76 passengers and include first-class seating.

“American had a very, very small, large RJ fleet,” he said. “They had 47 of them. Everybody else had 200, 300 of them. They’re now able to start to catch up with that. They’re able to start throwing in larger RJs that are a first class product in markets like Fort Wayne.”

Now, air travelers in the region need to support what carriers have added and are adding at FWA, because “it’s use it or lose it as far as the new service is concerned,” Hartz said.

“Success breeds more growth,” he said. “It’s bigger aircraft coming in; it’s more connectivity and potentially … another market in the northeast, or something like a Denver.”

Failure to support the new service would make Fort Wayne look like it wasn’t anything exceptional as an up and coming air travel market compared with other cities its size, he said.

The warm welcome he encouraged for new air service has been evident in the way Fort Wayne has embraced the destination added by Allegiant.

The carrier’s 2013 FWA boardings increased 27 percent from the previous year, to 61,699. For 2014, Allegiant boardings at the airport increased 36 percent to 50,706 through July, compared with the same period last year.

After Delta replaced the 50-seat regional jet with the 76-seat regional jet in July, “89 percent of that (larger) aircraft was full, and that’s a good percent,” Hinderman noted.

“Whenever you add seats, we’re able to sell them,” Hinderman said.

FWA has managed to go against industry trends and achieve growth through marketing and outreach efforts of the airport authority and community groups it has enlisted to help with air service development, Hartz said..

In addition to those efforts, Hinderman said FWA is becoming more attractive, because “the price differential is reducing.”

“As a general rule, we are becoming more price competitive, especially when you weigh in the drive time and the cost of a hotel or overnight stay,” he said.