John Wayne Airport will cut the number of seats Southwest Airlines Co. can fill with fliers next year by nearly 1 million and maintain or increase totals for other major air carriers, the airport’s annual allocation plan shows.
The airport commission approved the plan on Sept. 21, and it’s on the consent calendar for the Orange County Board of Supervisors’ Oct. 11 meeting.
Consent items are usually approved without discussion, an airport spokesperson said.
Annual seat allocations guide air carriers in how many passengers they can fly in or out of an airport. Airlines request seats by August; the airport commonly sets its plan in September for supervisors to vote on in October.
The airport allocated 12.76 million seats across all carriers this year and 12.74 million for next year—numbers that exceed the annual cap in a practical nod to the fact that airlines don’t constantly operate at 100% capacity.
Passenger traffic at John Wayne Airport is capped at 10.8 million for next year.
Southwest sought an increase of 500,000 in 2017 over its 2016 allocation of 6.04 million, an increase of about 8%; it got 5.1 million, a decrease of about 16%.
“They asked for about 1.5 million more than we were able to allocate,” said Eric Freed, an airport deputy director who oversees the process.
Southwest long has been the airport’s largest air carrier by passenger volume.
JWA’s passenger count last year was 10.2 million, up 8.5% over 2014 and an all-time record for the airport.
Southwest flew about 4.3 million of those passengers—42% of the total.
JWA is on pace to beat last year’s numbers.
Year-to-date numbers suggest an annual total of about 10.5 million passengers this year at John Wayne. Its 6.2 million passenger count through July is up 8.5% compared with the same period last year, and Southwest has flown 2.9 million of those passengers—a 47% share.
Southwest’s passenger count and JWA share for next year can’t be known, but based on the last two years of data, it could come in as low as about 3.6 million—a decline of about 700,000 passengers overall and roughly 33% of a maxed-out John Wayne flying up to 10.8 million passengers in 2017.
Freed said next year’s cut to Southwest’s assigned passenger capacity came because a year-to-year “supplemental pool” of seats—formed when carriers defer on allocations they could claim—had temporarily buoyed the Dallas-based carrier’s total numbers in recent years.
“That pool got reduced” for next year, Freed said, because other carriers—notably Alaska Air Group, Delta Air Lines Inc., and United Airlines Inc.—wanted more seats.
Among other major carriers’ allocations for next year are:
• Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, 1.62 million seats, up 19% from 1.36 million.
• Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, 1.57 million seats, up 33% from 1.18 million.
• Chicago-based United Airlines, 1.99 million seats, up 18% from 1.69 million.
American Airlines Inc. in Fort Worth, Texas, held about steady with 2.1 million seats allocated next year, compared with 2.14 million this year.
Frontier Airlines, a subsidiary of Indigo Partners LLC and based in Denver, gets a boost of about 8% to some 277,000 seats; WestJet Airlines Ltd. in Calgary drops about 8% to 88,000.
“All the other carriers were generally satisfied with their requests and allocations for 2017,” Freed said.
Southwest has at times this year used smaller aircraft to maintain its flight frequency based on seats it had been allocated, according to Mike Sikes, senior manager of business development, in an emailed statement.
A spokesperson said Southwest grew to 67 daily departures at JWA by the end of last year and wanted to maintain that number but will instead hit 62 to 63 departures in 2016.
“We have a great partnership with JWA and appreciate their continued focus on providing a fair outcome to all carriers,” Sikes said in a statement.
The airline added flights from nearby Long Beach Airport this year.
The full allocation process involves multiple calculations and planes of varying sizes and range, and separated by categories that are based on the amount of noise the planes make.
About 10.52 million of the 12.74 million seats allocated for next year are for longer-haul aircraft that are allowed to make more noise, Freed said.
The system is nearly unique to John Wayne Airport, Freed said, and grows out of a settlement agreement that has governed airport operations for several decades. The annual caps are in amendments to the agreement the parties have negotiated from time to time.
The passenger cap rises to 11.8 million in 2021.
Freed said JWA allocates “carrier by carrier” and reviews historical data and “seats available versus seats used” among other elements.
“We don’t allocate capacity based on liking markets or not liking airlines,” he said.
