McKinney National Airport lusts after some of Dallas Love Field’s air traffic
Last week McKinney National Airport’s “The Time is Wright” billboard was perched along the Dallas North Tollway close to downtown, next to Crow Holdings HQ; today it’s close to the Forest Lane exit. The airport hopes Dallas’ traffic, at least some of its air traffic, follows along as it keeps moving north: McKinney officials are using it as bait to lure business from Dallas Love Field to McKinney National once the Wright Amendment finally dies its slow death come October.
“We’re not trying to poach,” says the airport’s executive director Ken Wiegand. “But the Wright Amendment repeal is coming, and we’re thinking that more commercial traffic in Dallas will have an effect on business aviation traffic, which is our business. And if you need to make a choice, choose us. That’s all we’re saying.”
The timing for the push is certainly right: On Monday the city of Dallas finally OK’d turning over two gates to Virgin America, which will fly from Dallas to five big-city destinations including New York and Los Angeles, and just today Southwest CEO Gary Kelly spoke of adding 50 destinations as flight restrictions are removed from Love, including “plenty of international destinations.”
“After they get into this repeal and find out Virgin and Southwest are pushing a lot of traffic, the waits to get on the runway will likely get longer” for corporate and business planes trying to get into and out of Dallas, says Wiegand. “Love is in the middle of some highly controlled airspace, and this could cause delays. We want to be their alternative.”
He says the city has yet to go after specific corporations; their economic development folks were tied up trying to lure Toyota to McKinney. The billboards are little more than a reminder that the end of the Wright Amendment is coming, says Wiegand: “All we’re saying is, ‘Think about it,’” he says.
But the airport, known as the Collin County Regional Airport till the city bought it last year, has a 7000-foot-long commercial-grade runway that can handle the big planes — anything up to a 737, Wiegand says. And as far as he’s concerned, that means even an airline like Delta, which had its eye on at least one of those Love gates, should consider looking at McKinney. After all, commercial planes could fly from McKinney to, oh, New York or Los Angeles. Or anywhere in between.
Airlines should “consider coming here if they can’t get a gate at Love and are looking for a low-cost alternative,” says Wiegand. “And if they’re looking for a gate in a county where most of the tickets are bought. We can even handle 757s, but we’d have to have a larger terminal building and get retrofitted for baggage, security, parking and so forth. It would be an expensive proposition.”
But to compete with Dallas, he says, it just might be worth it.