As aircraft handlers hustled beneath a Spirit jet at Orlando International Airport a few days ago, the bright yellow plane’s bulbous nose resembled sunrise.
To hear from Spirit and airport executives, aviation employees and passengers, a ray of sunlight has peeked above the horizon after a dark pandemic night that for a scary time seemed without end.
“We just didn’t know what we were looking at," said John Kirby, Spirit vice president for network planning. "There was no demand and the open question was, ‘Should we even be flying?’”
But the Florida-based Spirit Airlines has jumped ahead of competitors, at least with publicity, announcing at Orlando’s airport that a surge underway now and several more in coming weeks will send scores of parked aircraft back into service.
Spirit anticipates that July, when Disney World reopens, will echo the not-so-distant days of hustle and bustle at Orlando International Airport as the airline makes a turnaround that executives described as sooner and more rapid than expected.
Orlando airport director Phil Brown cautioned that “every airline is different.”
The low-fare airlines such as Spirit, serving tourists and travelers visiting family and friends, historically have been more agile with economic changes, Brown said.
“Spirit made the first announcement of adding flights back and others are probably going to be a little more cautious,” Brown said, referring to the legacy airlines and their need to fill first and business-class seats and draw corporate travelers.
The nation’s air travel bottomed out April 14, when the combined number of TSA security screenings was 87,534 at all checkpoints in the U.S., a figure down from 2.2 million on the same day last year.
At Orlando International Airport alone, TSA had screened an average nearly 70,000 passengers daily before the pandemic, when the airport ranked as the nation’s 10th-busiest with more than 50 million passengers annually.
On Friday, the airport was expecting to host nearly 13,000 passengers outbound compared with 75,162 on the same day last year. The airport had counted nearly 1,000 takeoffs and landings each day prior to the pandemic. About 350 were scheduled for Friday, a day in which Orlando International Airport had no international flights.
By early May, air travel had “fallen off a cliff,” Kirby said, and Spirit had rapidly shut down service, reducing flights to an average of five daily departures from Orlando, down from more than 60 daily.
But, toward the middle of May, the airline saw signals, largely through internal metrics from its reservation system and advanced bookings, of an uptick.
“We started to see demand pick up albeit in a very small way," Kirby said. “Up until then, there really wasn’t any evidence that there should be any capacity at all. It was that severe of a drop-off.”
It was enough evidence; Spirit soon was formulating “going all in in putting a significant amount of service back in place,” Kirby said.
More than 30 airlines operate at Orlando International Airport, including the big, three legacy carriers, American, Delta and United, and the biggest low-fare carriers, Southwest, JetBlue, Frontier and Spirit.
Based on scheduled seats in June, Southwest is the busiest, followed in order by Frontier, American, Spirit, JetBlue, Delta and United.
Frontier and Spirit stand apart in that both have made big bets on Orlando.
Frontier is based in Denver, the airline’s busiest location. Spirit is based near Fort Lauderdale, which is that airline’s busiest hub. Second-busiest for both carriers is Orlando International.
Vicki Jaramillo, senior director of marketing and air-service development at Orlando’s airport, said her team has been feeding airlines with data and news about Central Florida’s reopening from the coronavirus.
Jaramillo said Southwest Airlines is slated to return to 85 percent of its service by the end of the year and Delta is positioning Orlando as its busiest destination after its hub cities in the U.S.
Last month, Brown, the airport director, presented the airport authority with predictions: 26 million passengers this fiscal year, 25 million next year, 40 million in 2023, 45 million in 2024 and 49 million in 2025.
“I’m happy if I’m wrong,” Brown said.
At the depth of the COVID-19 pandemic and with a recession taking root, the airport’s passenger traffic was down 96 percent, Brown said. This past week, it was down 83 percent.
“We are starting a gradual comeback, Brown said. “The big unknown is joblessness and the impact on discretionary income. There are many people out there who are not working.”
He said Spirit’s comeback was telling.
“They are not going to make this deployment of aircraft and this commitment of aircraft lightly because it’s expensive, so that’s a good signal,” Brown said of Spirit, which started operating from Orlando in 1993. “They are a Florida-based airline and they understand this market.”
Across its entire network of the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean, Spirit had dwindled to as few as 50 flights daily in early May. This week, the number rises to at least 150 on average and higher on some days. On June 24, it will climb to 225 daily and rise to 300 daily by the end of the month, and then hit at least 550 beginning July 1.
“In July we are going to be back to 70 percent of our schedule and that’s quite a large and rapid revamp of our service,” said Spirit’s chief commercial officer, Matt Klein, who lives in Winter Park.
“We’ve always seen that leisure traffic comes back first and fastest, corporate travel takes longer to return and transatlantic traffic takes even longer to return,” Klein said. “There’s lingo of 'VFR, visiting friends and relatives.’ The visiting friends and relatives traffic always comes back first.”
A month from now, Spirit expects to operate about 45 flights daily out of Orlando and is targeting 70 flights daily by this time next year, potentially surpassing the volume prior to the pandemic.
“By spring break next year, we will be fully back,” Klein said of flights out of Orlando.
Tempering the outlook from Spirit, other airlines and the airport are the protocols for dealing with COVID-19.
The industry has reacted with a host of measures to win back confidence: aggressively cleaning aircraft, requiring face coverings, checking temperatures and equipping plane ventilation with high-efficiency filters.
They are limiting capacity, including, to varying degrees, keeping passengers out of middle seats.
For Spirit, previously flying planes at more than 80 percent full, the official outlook for this year is planes about 60 percent full, but airline leaders are pushing for a higher percentage.
At Spirit’s ticket counters at Orlando International Airport recently, many passengers were making their first trips since the disease outbreak.
John Castle, his wife, daughter and granddaughter, all wearing masks, were flying home to Ohio after visiting his parents in Cocoa Beach.
“We knew we needed to be careful,” Castle said. But they weren’t particularly worried, their confidence lifted by their church of 600 members in Zanesville, Ohio, resuming inside services this month. “We kept a look out for people who might have been unhealthy,” he said.
Tionna Hodges, 21, traveled to Central Florida from Ohio with two friends for a vacation. “I’m a little bit nervous,” Hodges said of the risk of infection. “But I’m comfortable with flying.”
Spirit bases 1,200 flight attendants, pilots, mechanics and other employees at Orlando’s airport and more than 500 contractor employees. “We are not a small employer,” Klein said.
The enthusiasm for resuming flights rippled through the workforce as employees, either laid off or reduced in hours, went back to work.
“We are coming back really fast,” said pilot Thomas Hill, with another pilot, Sean Kalasky, in an Airbus cockpit, preparing for a Nashville departure.
Elio Contreras, 24, a Spirit pilot coordinator in Orlando and informally a goodwill ambassador for his company at the airport, said he understands his work has a larger mission: delivering tourists who boost the region’s economic well-being.
“I can’t hope for more than that,” Contreras said.
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