GUEST POST: Cranky Flier Mulls Service Prospects for BWI Airport

Editor’s note: I’m on vacation this week, so I have some of my aviation/airline/travel geek friends doing guest posts here this week.  First up is my good friend Brett Snyder, aka the Cranky Flier.  Brett and I became friends back in June 2001, when I moved to Phoenix to work for Mesa Air Group and he was working at what was then America West Airlines.  His blog is a must-read.  Today, he posts about air service prospects for my hometown airport (which I’m sure he did to annoy me). Enjoy!

With the Queen on vacation and today being her birthday (long live the Queen!), I thought it would be appropriate to take a look at her hometown airport.  I believe BWI may officially have the longest airport name on Earth.  At last check, it was Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, though they may have thrown Cal Ripken in there at some point.  In reality, they should just name the place Southwest Airlines Airport.

Southwest Airlines' Shamu Boeing 737 All BWI photos by Benet J. Wilson

BWI started as a beach-head for Southwest on the east coast back in 1993.  As a student at George Washington in D.C., I used to take Southwest back to Phoenix to visit my family during breaks.  At that time, it usually required taking two stops through one of the few gateways served from the airport.  Since that time, BWI has become Southwest’s primary east coast destination.  In fact, as of the end March, BWI was Southwest’s fourth busiest airport with 187 flights a day to 45 different cities.

This has been good for BWI, which traded a dying US Airways hub operation for what is now a strong Southwest presence that serves Baltimore and the DC area well.  There appeared to be a threat to BWI’s status in the Southwest network when the airline decided to start flying to Washington/Dulles a few years ago, but that effort has really fizzled.  Today, Southwest serves only two cities with 8 flights a day from Dulles; hardly a threat.

With Southwest’s acquisition of AirTran, BWI will approach fortress hub status for Southwest.  For the year ending March 2011, Southwest carried 55.76 percent of passengers at the airport while AirTran carried 15.31 percent</a>.  That’s right.  The combined airlines will now have more than 70 percent of BWI passengers.  As we’ve seen at other airports with similar standing in the Southwest system (Houston/Hobby and Chicago/Midway, for example) this is a double-edged sword.

It’s great for an airport to have a strong presence from a “low fare” airline even if the fares aren’t as low as they used to be.  But people love Southwest, and that’s been excellent for BWI over the last twenty years.

The Southwest Airlines Concourse at BWI Airport

It does, however, effectively kill the chance of any other airline increasing service at the airport in any significant way.  All other airline service at the airport goes to hubs (except for a couple of 9-seaters on essential air service routes), and the airlines have been using smaller and smaller airplanes on those routes.

In the last 10 years, Continental used to fly jets as large as a 757 from Cleveland to BWI.  Now there are four 70-seat turboprops a day.  United used to fly widebodies to O’Hare.  Now it’s a mix of regional jets and narrowbody mainline aircraft.  The numbers show the same thing.

Back in 2002, airlines other than Southwest and AirTran carried 47.5 percent of traffic at the airport compared to the less than 30 percent today.  That loss of share hasn’t been solely due to growth by Southwest.  Those same airlines carried a quarter fewer passengers this past year than they did in 2002.

As we’ve seen elsewhere, as Southwest gets stronger, others shy away and that means that the future of BWI is largely rooted in what Southwest does.

A stained-glass window at BWI Airport

There was some excitement recently when CEO Gary Kelly suggested that BWI would be the natural jumping off point for long haul low-cost service sometime in the future, but that’s far from a done deal.  If Southwest tries something like that, then BWI is the right place to try it, but it’s far from clear that a service like that can make money.  And nobody else is coming in anytime soon.

Outside of AirTran’s Caribbean service, BWI has had a very difficult time attracting and retaining international flights.  Sure, there’s Air Canada to Toronto, but come on.  Canada doesn’t count.  That leaves the daily British Airways flight to London, but that doesn’t come cheap.  In fact, BWI has had to pay up to keep that service flying.

So BWI is an airport with a mixed future.  As Southwest’s largest east coast gateway, it’s in a very good position to succeed in the future with growth to new cities.  That growth however, will undoubtedly come at the expense of other airline service, which has already shrunk significantly over the years.

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Tags: airlines, airport, AirTran Airways, Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, brett snyder, cranky flier, Southwest Airlines