November 30, 2020

FALLS CREEK — Over the past month, Southern Airways Express has been flying more often to Pittsburgh International Airport from DuBois Regional Airport rather than Baltimore-Washington International Airport, according to CEO Stan Little.

“We’re tracking at about 500 (people) this month so far; 691 is the number from last January,” said Little during the teleconference meeting of the Clearfield-Jefferson Counties Regional Airport Authority last week. “So in these next 10 days, if we get 191 people on the planes we’ll at least meet January’s numbers. Pittsburgh currently is outpacing Baltimore. We’re not particularly surprised about that for your market. Much of the Baltimore traffic, as you know, is local traffic versus the Pittsburgh traffic, which is predominantly connecting.

“I can tell you from firsthand experience, there’s virtually nothing going on in DC right now,” said Little. “The city has been as shut down as just about anywhere in the country. No one on Capitol Hill is taking meetings or even being allowed to have guests into the Capitol or into the Senate and House office buildings. So it’s not surprising at all to us, that Pittsburgh is where you’re seeing the traffic. It appears to be mostly leisure traffic. These are folks wanting to go visit family after many months of not seeing them or come down here to Florida and get their face in the sun for a little bit of time and get out from under some COVID rules.”

Little also discussed the livery new seats and the airline overhaul.

“The airplane overhaul is at a pace of one aircraft per month,” said Little. “And we continue to ship the TKS aircraft to the mid-Atlantic for the winter season. Currently in your footprint there are, as you know, we have four CAS cities that we operate there. Five as of this very moment, there will be four as of Jan. 1 when Altoona goes to boutique, they trade out to Sky West. We have one more that is coming your way. A TKS bird that we just flew over the ocean from Hawaii about a week ago. It took us about three weeks to finally get the winds, right. Believe it or not, the plane won’t make it across 2,500 miles of Pacific Ocean unless it has a strong enough tailwind.”

Southern had a plane that had to sit on the ramp at Kona for close to a month waiting for those winds to get right, said Little.

For the full article, please visit The Courier Express.