Officials win back flights

BY BILLY BRUCE
The Valdosta Daily Times

May 03, 2008 07:58 pm

— VALDOSTA – The Good Book says “Ask and Ye Shall Receive.” And one old saying says “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
Whatever the case, successful lobbying efforts by Valdosta Regional Airport officials have won back a third daily commercial flight to Atlanta after Delta/Atlanta Southeast Airlines (ASA) cut the flight in a cost-saving move just two weeks ago.
Valdosta Interim Airport Manager Dr. Patti Clark and Valdosta-Lowndes Airport Authority Chairman Joe Prater announced the good news after Delta officials told them April 28 that, beginning on July 7, four days a week, Valdostans will again have access to three flights a day.
Those three flights will be offered on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Clark said in an e-mail.
They’ll have two flights a day Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday. In September, Delta has promised to have three flights a day every day, when historically the airline has had at least one day when there were just two flights — even before the mid-April flight cut.
After ASA announced that it was cutting the 11:35 a.m. flight for Atlanta because of “skyrocketing fuel costs” and because load statistics didn’t meet profit ratio margins in tough economic times, local airport officials wasted no time to lobby the airlines for the return of the removed flight.
ASA contracts with Delta to provide local commercial connections from Valdosta to Atlanta.
Clark said part of their successful lobbying effort relied on information about Moody Air Force Base demands for commercial flight availabilities.
“Recently we have worked closely with Moody AFB to gather data on the critical nature of having adequate flights in place to get personnel to and from needed locations,” Clark said. “Moody has provided a great deal of information to us which has in turn been provided to Delta to assist in their capacity planning. We are still working on some additional data from Moody, which will include more refined travel days, future travel required by new mission changes and the most frequent locations traveled to by our military members.
Also, Clark said she hopes to pass along corresponding data from local travel agencies to confirm the needs for the Valdosta area business and leisure travelers.
“The bottom line is we are trying to impress upon Delta the dynamics of the community and our need for consistent levels of service,” she said. “Communication is key and I believe it has been a critical part of this process in getting the third flight back on the schedule.”
Are these measures enough to keep or increase our service levels? Clark says no.
“As a community we must remember that airlines are businesses and businesses must make money to survive,” Clark acknowledged. “Sure they are a service industry, but the bottom line is no different. If a flight from a location consistently loses money, the airline will cancel that flight.”
The temporarily lost midday flight that will be resumed in July has historically lost revenue, Delta officials told Clark and Prater.
“In a business where load factors (numbers of people loaded on an aircraft) are key to revenue decisions, the midday flight for us has in past been only around 69 percent,” Clark said. “The break-even load factor today is 79 percent. So, you can see why the decision was made to cancel the flight.”
In recent months, however, the Atlanta flights have averaged higher loads on all flights, she said.
“In fact we were at 79.9 percent in March and enplaned 3,516 passengers. This number of passengers is near our record high numbers of 2006,” she said. “This is all good, but we must continue to use our air service or face other reductions in the future. That is the message I wish for the community to receive … We have commercial air service, please utilize it. We are one of only nine airports in the state of Georgia with commercial air service and to a certain extent we control our own destiny for the future.”
Clark also stressed that local airport officials realize that air travel in the U.S. today is not always as economical, pleasant nor timely as they would like it to be.
“The financial state of the airlines is dismal and as an industry in good years it is only a 1 to 2 percent profit margin industry,” she said. “Fuel prices are up as we all know very well and the airlines are paying the price also. Hang in there with us. The nature of the air industry is cyclic and hopefully we will see an upswing soon.”
In conclusion, Clark urged travelers to keep in mind that fares out of Valdosta are very competitive with neighboring airports.
“We still have free parking and there are no long security lines at our airport,” she said. “Valdosta Regional Airport serves this entire region and please know that we are committed to making air travel from our airport as convenient, pleasant and safe as possible ... always.”