Airlines carry 13% more passengers at Dallas Love Field last month than in October 2013
We can call this an incomplete grade. But airlines at Dallas Love Field hauled 13 percent more passengers last month than they did in October 2013.
The reason for the increase, obviously, is the Oct. 13 expiration of the Wright amendment and the addition of more flights out of the Dallas airport to more distant cities.
Numbers from the Dallas Department of Aviation show that 863,771 passengers got on and off airline flights at Love Field last month, up 13.1 percent and nearly 100,000 from the 763,854 that flew in and out of Love a year earlier.
The number of flights increased less than that – to 8,298 in 2014 from 7,574 in October 2013, up 9.6 percent.
But the bias was more to bigger airplanes. Delta began flying 117-seat Boeing 717s after the Oct. 13 date, replacing 50-seat airplanes flown by a regional partner. Virgin America began flying its Airbus jets, which range in size from 119 seats to 149 seats, with most Dallas flights so far on the 119-seat Airbus A319.
Southwest Airlines boosted its traffic by 8.7 percent, from 736,962 passengers in October 2013 to 801,445 passengers in October 2014. Even so, its market share dropped 3.7 percentage points, from 96.5 percent of all passengers carried to 92.8 percent.
We called it an incomplete grade because the airport flying didn’t expand until Oct. 13, and airlines kept adding flights after that.
Virgin America, which began with nine departures to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., added four New York flights on Oct. 28.
Southwest Airlines launched flights to seven cities on Oct. 13, but didn’t add the next eight cities until Nov. 2.
So November should give us a better picture of how the airlines are doing with their newly acquired freedom.