Frontier Airlines ending daily flights to Dayton, Ohio

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Frontier Airlines is ending daily flights out of Dayton International Airport at the end of May.

Joe Cogliano

Senior Reporter- Dayton Business Journal

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Frontier Airlines is pulling out of Dayton after cutting back service between Denver and the Ohio city from two flights to one on Jan. 3.

The Denver-based carrier, the sixth-busiest airline at the Dayton International Airport, will leave the market on May 31, airport officials confirmed Friday.

Terrence Slaybaugh, director of aviation for the city of Dayton, which owns the airport, said Frontier representatives told him they wouldn’t compete against Southwest Airlines, which began flying from Dayton to Denver last summer.

Frontier could not be immediately reached for comment. The move comes as the airline is starting or boosting service out of cities such as Columbus, Cleveland, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and Fort Meyers, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, Fla., as well as New Orleans.

Through the first 11 months of 2012, Frontier had nearly 80,000 boardings in Dayton, a 6.4 percent drop from the same period in 2011.

Frontier still flies between Denver International Airport and Cleveland as well as Indianapolis, which is near Dayton. The airline recently cut service to Louisvile, Ky., also near Dayton. It serves Cincinnati and Columbus but does not fly from those points to Denver.

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E-mail jcogliano@bizjournals.com. Call (937) 528-4424. Twitter.com/joecogDBJ