Valley airline issues both really good and really bad

Spring flights could get chopped by United. Summer is doing really well

by Mark Reaman

If you fly out of the Gunnison-Crested Butte regional airport in the spring, it isn’t easy, with limited flights and quirky timing. But it soon might be impossible.

Gunnison Valley Rural Transportation Authority (RTA) representatives met with executives of United Airlines in Chicago last month and one message they heard was that the spring flights between Denver and Gunnison might be on the chopping block.

“United is very concerned about the Gunnison-Denver flights, particularly in the spring and the fall,” RTA airline consultant Kent Myers told the board at its July 10 meeting. “They indicated there may not be service in the near future in the spring. It may happen. It’s not yet a fact, but they said it.”

“The fact is we don’t have a large population base in our catchment area,” explained RTA executive director Scott Truex. “The end of the ski season to about the middle of June is very soft. It might be the end of the service after we do the runway improvements in the spring of 2017.

“We will be looking toward more year-round service to Texas,” Truex continued. “It might be something like two or three flights a week to Dallas or Houston.”

“I think that is a viable deal,” said Myers.

“It is coming down the road,” concluded Truex.

“We have the smallest catchment area of any place United flies anywhere in the world,” pointed out RTA board member Jonathan Houck.

“Pricing is a factor, too. It is expensive in the spring,” commented Mt. Crested Butte town manager Joe Fitzpatrick. “It’s not a good spiral.”

“Those six to eight weeks are tough. We don’t have visitors or second homeowners flying in. We will have to deal with the issue,” concluded RTA chairperson Paula Swenson.

The RTA does not pay for a guarantee with the United Airlines flights between Denver and Gunnison as it does with the Texas flights so its influence is very limited.

Summer and winter looking good

As for the summer flight program originating in Houston that started last year, Myers said it was doing very well. While last summer had a load factor of 82 percent, this summer has more than twice as many seats and is expected to tally a load factor above 70 percent. “We’ve more than doubled the amount of seats coming in this summer and we have already sold more than twice as many seats as all of last year,” he said.

As for the upcoming winter season, Myers said American Airlines tried to get “very aggressive” with pushing more flights into the resort in the winter. “It’s not just us but all the resorts,” he said. “But we asked them to pull back with us. We didn’t want to be responsible for more guarantees. We feel comfortable we won’t get clobbered with too many seats.”

The concern was that if too many seats were allocated to Gunnison, they wouldn’t be filled and the RTA would end up having to pay a larger guarantee than it has in the recent past.

The RTA board was also excited about the upcoming winter flights from Alaska Airlines between Los Angeles and Gunnison.

“I already booked mine for January,” noted Swenson. “L.A. in January sounds okay.”