LB airport awards additional flights
Southwest readies new routes to Albuquerque, El Paso and Colorado Springs by December
Southwest Airlines now has another five flight slots at the LongBeach Airport, officials announced Thursday, further securing that airline as LGB's largest carrier.
The airport announced the availability of the additional flight slots in early December after an annual review of its compliance with Long Beach's noise ordinance found that LGB's carriers had operated below the required standards, thus freeing up room for the extra slots.
If the city had not added the five slots, the grandfathered status of its noise ordinance allocations would have been nullified and the airport would have had a smaller noise budget to work with during the current budget year.
With its additional slots, Southwest has added several new flights from LGB to various destinations across the country — including nonstop daily service to the Albuquerque International Sunport, which is scheduled to begin in September. Daily service to the Colorado Springs Airport and the El Paso International Airport will begin July 11.
The airline has also brought back its seasonal service to the Kahului Airport in Maui, which will begin operation March 9, and will increase its nonstop flights to the Dallas Love Field Airport to twice daily, the city's announcement said.
Southwest now holds 45 of the airport's 58 total flight slots. Delta Air Lines has seven and Hawaiian Airlines has two.
American Airlines, meanwhile, recently said it would cease its operations out of the Long Beach Airport because the routes were not meeting
financial performance expectations. The airline, though, has not officially relinquished its three flight slots back to LGB yet, the announcement said — meaning the airport has not yet been able to reallocate the American slots to other carriers on its waitlist.
“Airport flight slots are awarded based on a waiting list of official requests from current LGB air carriers that have expressed interest in additional service,” the announcement said, “as well as new entrants interested in starting service at LGB.”
The Long Beach Airport's air carriers now provide nonstop service to 22 cities around the country — more than at any other point in its nearly 100-year history, the announcement said.