For LR, 2 flights to cease, 2 to start

Little Rock's Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field will lose two nonstop Southwest Airlines flights in January, to Baltimore and Chicago, members of the airport's commission were told Tuesday.

Southwest will offer two daily nonstop flights to St. Louis International Airport to replace the discontinued flights. The Baltimore and Chicago nonstop flights will end Jan. 6 and the St. Louis flights will begin the same day.

There weren't enough passengers on the Baltimore or Chicago flights to make them profitable, said Seth Quillin, senior manager of network planning and performance with Southwest. There also were problems with frequent delays in Baltimore that became a problem for other Southwest flights that were delayed, Quillin said.

During the peak of the year in the summer, there were about 70 passengers leaving Little Rock on the daily flight to Baltimore, which underperformed the rest of the Southwest system, Quillin said.

"[Little Rock and Southwest] have worked together for about two years to make the Baltimore and Chicago flights work, in terms of options like times and fares," said Ron Mathieu, executive director of the Little Rock airport. "Ultimately the decision was made that we would eliminate those flights."

Little Rock has lost the Baltimore flight but it has gained access to many more destinations through St. Louis, Quillin said. Southwest hasn't had a nonstop flight from Little Rock to St. Louis since 2013.

Travelers still can reach Baltimore and Chicago with one stop in St. Louis. Plus there are 30 destinations, including Washington, D.C., Boston, San Francisco, Oklahoma City and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., available to Little Rock passengers through St. Louis connections.

Adding two daily flights to St. Louis was good for Little Rock, said Joseph Pickering, a senior consultant for Mead & Hunt Inc. of Middleton, Wis.

"Most airlines, if something isn't working, would say let's pull it," Pickering said. "We've seen that repeatedly in the industry over the last 10 to 20 years. It would have been easy for Southwest to say Baltimore didn't work, let's pull the plug on it."

Fortunately Southwest was willing to work with the airport, he said.

Southwest has no plans to discontinue its nonstop flights from Little Rock to Phoenix and Las Vegas, Quillin said.

Beginning in October, Southwest decreased its daily flights from Little Rock from 11 to seven because of the expiration of the federal Wright Amendment. For more than 30 years, the Wright Amendment limited the destinations of planes with more than 56 seats departing Dallas Love Field to airports in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Kansas, Louisiana, Alabama and Missouri.

With the expiration of the Wright Amendment, and the reduction in Southwest flights, Little Rock has been losing as many as 20,000 passengers a month.

Through August, there were 93,651 fewer passengers at the Little Rock airport than through the first eight months last year.

The Wright Amendment led to the drop in passengers, Pickering said. In addition to the lost Southwest flights, many passengers flying out of Little Rock were from outside the Little Rock market.

"They weren't passengers who started their itinerary and ended it in Little Rock," Pickering said. "They were transient. The reason was the Wright Amendment put something artificially in the marketplace that otherwise wasn't there. They were not really connected [to Little Rock]."

Business on 09/16/2015

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