John Wayne Airport revised its monthly passenger counts downward by 348,965 for travel from July 2015 through August 2016 after the discovery in September of an over-count by JWA’s busiest airline by volume, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co.
The revision cut the facility’s 2015 passenger count by 141,792 passengers from 10,180,258 to 10,038,466. The 2016 count is 207,173 lower than it would have been, with the revision of the miscount through August (see chart, page 9).
The difference comes to about 3% on an annualized basis.
The airport is currently limited to 10.8 million passengers per year, and each commercial airline has a certain number of seats allocated annually for their operations here.
The revision didn’t affect either the airport cap or Southwest’s allocation, the airport said, and had no financial impact on the airport, the airline or the county of Orange, which owns JWA.
Airport staff didn’t report the revisions to the Orange County Airport Commission or the Orange County Board of Supervisors.
Southwest acknowledged its miscount in an exchange of letters last fall between Airport Director Barry Rondinella and Southwest Associate General Counsel for Operations & Environment Barry Brown and recently corrected its processes that led to the error.
“Last fall, the airport and Southwest Airlines discovered that Southwest was not including information that would allow the airport to determine” correct passenger counts, an airline spokesperson said via email.
An “audit of passengers on its flights to and from John Wayne Airport, retroactive to July 1, 2015” produced the corrected numbers.
“Southwest Airlines has modified its ongoing reporting process to assure we provide accurate information to the airport on an ongoing basis,” the statement said.
An Oct. 27 letter from Brown to Rondinella said, “We sincerely regret our error in reporting and have instituted a process to verify accurate reporting.”
Connections
The airport said the miscount stemmed from a change in the way Southwest reported its local passenger totals.
“Southwest started [counting] connecting passengers through John Wayne,” said Nikolas Gaskins, who runs the airport’s Access and Noise Office, which reports passenger counts.
The office collects daily passenger counts from commercial airlines and produces daily, weekly, and monthly internal reports, Gaskins said. The Federal Aviation Administration collects numbers from general aviation carriers. These and other data are integrated into a monthly passenger and flight count total JWA issues to the public.
“When [Southwest’s] volume grew with flights” it had added, he said, “we noticed [the] trend in the data.”
Gaskins said most other commercial airlines use John Wayne Airport as an origin or terminus—where a flight begins or ends. Southwest flights at JWA include those in which the airport is a connecting stop—neither its beginning nor end.
Regulations governing JWA’s operations exclude counting passengers on connecting flights that will stop at the airport and depart within three hours.
Gaskins said the airport is “to my knowledge unique” among U.S. airports in this definition of a passenger.
Southwest still sends connecting flights through the airport but doesn’t count those passengers in its reporting to JWA.
Other carriers also use the airport for connecting flights, but no other airline had miscounts, the airport said.
Revisions
Southwest’s error likely began prior to July 2015 as Southwest began to phase in its “connecting passenger” method, and extended into last September, the airport said.
The airport said it couldn’t give an exact start date because Southwest implemented the connecting flights approach and its counting of those passengers over time.
“We know that it probably did [begin earlier] but [the miscount] didn’t affect [whether we hit] the passenger cap and there was no financial impact,” an airport spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said the airport chose July 2015 as the start date for the audit because it’s the start of the fiscal year.
The miscount continued into September 2016, when the error was discovered by the airport, but the facility hadn’t yet released a passenger total for that month and Southwest’s corrected totals were incorporated into those numbers when released.
The revision of monthly numbers continued through the end of last year and delayed the public reporting of JWA passenger and flight totals for September, October and November.
November totals were released last Thursday and show JWA on pace to grow its passenger count 5% in 2016.
