Jan. 25—Breeze Airways, a regional airline that started flying out of Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in July, is making significant adjustments to its schedule again, including trimming three routes from New Orleans.

The airline, which was created in spring last year by JetBlue founder David Neeleman with the aim of tapping demand from smaller cities wanting direct routes to cities with a strong tourist pull, has made several changes to schedules in the months since it launched, both adding and cutting routes.

The latest changes for New Orleans will mean that direct flights to two Ohio airports, Akron- Canton and Columbus, will go from year-round to seasonal. Breeze spokesman Gareth Edmonson-Jones said that those flights now will operate between February and April, and from October through the New Year's.

Additionally, the New Orleans to Louisville (Kentucky) Muhammad Ali International Airport flights will drop from four times a week to twice weekly. Those flights will now operate on Sundays and Thursdays for the summer through the Labor Day weekend, after which a new fall/winter schedule will be determined, Edmonson-Jones said.

When it launched, Breeze said it expected to create more than 260 direct jobs in New Orleans. It received an incentive package from the state that includes a performance-based grant of $2.3 million over 10 years, as well as tax breaks on its jobs and training programs.

There were originally 10 Breeze flights from New Orleans: to Akron- Canton, Columbus, Charleston, South Carolina; Bentonville- Fayetteville, Arkansas; Huntsville, Alabama; Norfolk and Richmond in Virginia; and Oklahoma City and Tulsa, in Oklahoma.

The Huntsville and the two Oklahoma flights were dropped in November, and a weekly flight to West Palm Beach, Florida was added in December.

Breeze now flies from 18 cities, up two from the original number. The other hub cities are Tampa, Charleston, and Norfolk. As part of the latest shake-up, the Tampa- Columbus route was canceled from the end of April, while five routes had their frequency decreased and seven increased.

Breeze enplaned just over 6,300 passengers at New Orleans airport in November, according to the latest data from the airport. That was the carrier's strongest month since it started, bringing its total to just over 22,600 since it began in July.

In the same month, Southwest Airlines, the largest carrier operating from the airport, enplaned more than 165,000 passengers, accounting for 34% of total enplaned passengers. That was up more than 140% from the same month last year.

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