Flights from Fresno are fuller but much fewer

The number of airline passengers flying out of Fresno Yosemite International Airport in the first half of this year was down compared to the past two years, with airlines offering far fewer domestic flights than at any time in the past 12 years.

The U.S. Department of Transportation reported Friday that domestic airlines serving Fresno carried 294,359 passengers on departing flights from FYI through June 30. That’s a decline of more than 12,000 passengers, or about 4 percent, from the first six months of 2014. Fresno’s figures run counter to the nationwide trend, where passenger enplanements on domestic flights amounted to more than 341 million, up almost 4 percent from the first half of last year.

“We have kind of bucked the trend of what’s been happening at small airports in the past couple of years,” Fresno airports director Kevin Meikle said. “We’ve been fortunate that over the past few years we haven’t seen the same drop in passengers and drop in revenues.

“But now, over the past six months, we have had this drop in passengers,” he added.

Over the first six months of this year, airlines made about 5,091 domestic flights from FYI, a sharp decline of 20 percent from the 6,392 flights in 2014’s first half. The decrease in flights comes as airlines – particularly Utah-based SkyWest Airlines, which provides the majority of all domestic airline service to and from Fresno – adjust their schedules and convert their fleets to larger aircraft. A year ago, for example, SkyWest discontinued its five-times-daily United Express flights between Fresno and Las Vegas. The Fresno-Las Vegas route amounted to 35 of the 187 weekly departures operated by SkyWest at that time. The airline cited “poor performance” for abandoning the route.

Further eroding the number of flights was Allegiant Air’s decision to cease its seasonal flights from Fresno to Honolulu, and Frontier Airlines bailing out of the Fresno market earlier this year and dropping its four weekly round trips to and from Denver.

SkyWest operated 7 out of every 10 domestic flights taking off from Fresno in the first half of this year under contracts with United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines. The remaining 30 percent were scattered among Allegiant, American, Horizon Air and Mesa Airlines.

“What’s happening nationwide is that airlines seem to be trying to push passengers to larger hub airports, telling passengers, ‘Jump in your car and drive to big airports,’” Meikle said. “We’ve not seen the full effects of that before, but it’s not a surprise that we’re seeing a reduction.”

Earlier this year, SkyWest completed the transition of its fleet from small propeller-driven airplanes to 50-seat regional jets on its flights from Fresno to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Last month, Alaska Airlines converted its turboprop flights between Fresno and San Diego to regional jets.

While there are fewer flights, the airliners that are taking off and landing at Fresno are operating with more of their available seats filled than ever before. The load factor for the first half of 2015 was more than 88 percent, a calculation of the number of passenger-miles flown as a proportion of the available “seat-miles” on flights. A 50-seat plane on a 200-mile flight represents 10,000 available seat-miles; if that plane is carrying 45 passengers, it amounts to 9,000 passenger miles, or a load factor of 90 percent.

Lino Del Signore, the airport’s finance officer, and Meikle said the high load factors and an improving economy mean that so far, Fresno Yosemite International has not seen a dropoff in revenue. Landing fees and per-passenger security fees paid to the airport by airlines are down. But money spent by passengers and visitors at the airport, such as parking, retail shopping or dining at snack shops or airport restaurants, is up.

“There’s this factor in the industry called ‘propensity to spend,’ and it’s a real variable,” Del Signore said. “The passengers’ propensity to spend changes depending on where you are in the business cycle. If we’re in a recession, it’s much reduced. If the economy is good, it’s increased.”

Meikle added that only about 25 percent of the airport’s overall revenues are directly linked to aviation operations, “so there’s a good insulation factor there for us.”

The domestic passenger figures don’t include people flying on Volaris or AeroMexico on their flights from Fresno to Guadalajara, Mexico. Through the first three months of the year, the two Mexican airlines made 137 departures and carried 17,903 passengers – a figure that’s up from last year and growing strong, Del Signore said.

This story was originally published September 12, 2015 at 11:15 AM with the headline "Flights from Fresno are fuller but much fewer."