Frontier, Southwest Lead Big Bounce-back at Valley International Airport

Mar. 6—HARLINGEN — Passenger departures from Valley International Airport showed strong gains in January, with Frontier Airlines and Southwest Airlines posting major improvements over a year ago.

Frontier, which a few months ago added two key destinations to its regular flight schedule, was up 340.2 percent from a year ago. Southwest was up 107.7 percent from last year.

The numbers released to the VIA board of directors last week made heartening reading from the pandemic-related low enplanement numbers posted in April 2020 (2,533) and March 2020 (5,189).

But United Airlines did not share in the strong passenger demand at VIA, said Marv Esterly, director of aviation, who noted the airline was down 8 percent in the number of passengers departing.

"We had a good conversation with United Airlines at Routes Americas (2022 conference)," he told the board. "This is happening in a lot of places, particularly at every airport in the Rio Grande Valley. They don't have the aircraft, they don't have the crew."

"So they're utilizing all their 50 passengers (planes), they pulled a bunch of their bigger aircraft out and are utilizing the 50-passenger to serve this market because of the stage length of the leg here," he added. "They can't use those 50-passenger aircraft in other places. This will change in the future but this is happening through the Rio Grande Valley with United Airlines."

There was more joy in the numbers for other airlines flying in and out of Harlingen.

" American Airlines is taking advantage of that, of course," Esterly said. "As you can see, last year they had 3,000 enplanements to 6,000, actually doubling the size of the number of enplanements they have here. ..."

" Frontier Airlines is up 340 percent with the advent of Las Vegas and Orlando to the market," he added. "So they went from 505 enplanements, that was one flight a week on a Saturday to Denver last year, to now two flights a week to Denver and two flights a week to Vegas. Those flights are doing pretty good at this point. We're excited about that."

Minneapolis-based Sun Country Airlines enplaned 2,340 passengers at VIA in January, up from 1,982 last year, an increase of 18.2 percent.

Mexico-based airline Viva Aerobus had 338 enplanements for the month. It did not operate out of Harlingen last January.

Delta Air Lines did not offer winter passenger service from VIA.

" Delta has paused this season again, this is the second year in a row they paused the season, and of course that has to do with crew issuers and pilot issues," Esterly said. "All indications are they're coming back to this market was very good for them with a lot of connecting traffic."

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