November 28, 2020
FALLS CREEK — Stan Little, chairman and CEO of Southern Airways, the Essential Air Service provider for the DuBois Regional Airport, said he believes DuBois Regional Airport “has weathered the COVID storm remarkably well” during Wednesday’s Clearfield-Jefferson Counties Regional Airport teleconference meeting.
“Certainly, we don’t have the enplanements that we thought we would have a year ago when looking at the numbers, but we are getting much closer to where those numbers were a year ago than we thought we would be looking ahead from six months ago,” said Little. The employment numbers at DuBois continue to improve, and in fact, we are tracking for this month, November, to be relatively on par with the pre-COVID numbers of last January and February.”
Little noted that January and February numbers are usually the lowest of the year, but nevertheless, “we are getting back at least to some semblance of normalcy in that we look like a normal month almost for the month of November.”
The DuBois Regional Airport was the lowest from the year in April, and that was at about a 4 percent load factor, Little said.
“We then increased each month over month up until this month,” he said. “So despite the fact that we have had some setbacks in the COVID numbers across the country, we have not yet seen that setback in enplanements at DuBois or across our system. So each month has grown above the month before it with November tracking to be the highest thus far.”
Where those numbers will be in December, January and February cannot be predicted, said Little.
“As you know from watching the news, it does appear that we are hitting some all-time highs unfortunately, in the COVID numbers,” he said. “We don’t really have a forecast as to whether or not that’s going to show up enplanement numbers, but it hasn’t yet. So we’ll see where that goes.”
If the vaccine gets here fast enough, “so that we can staunch any bleed off of passengers, maybe we will avoid going back down to the low numbers we’ve seen so far,” said Little. “We also, as you know, have a new administration that will be coming in in January. So how that administration will handle the rules of travel or the recommendations for travel through the CDC remains to be seen.”
From a performance standpoint, Little discussed the performance data for the last three months as being 99.7 percent in August, 100 percent in September, 98.8 percent in October.
“That is all completion, absolute completion,” he said. “When looking at the controllable completion, we are at 100 percent all three months. So very little that we could do much better from a performance standpoint, including what we have been tracking now more than anything else, which is our on-time percentage. The 814 has been 79 percent in August, and then 90 percent and 92 percent, September, October.”
Those are numbers that are at the very top of the airline industry, said Little.
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