HARLINGEN — Valley International Airport officials saw more than 40,000 passengers board commercial airline flights in March, the first time the number has been breached since the Great Recession of 2008.
Those high numbers — 40,278 officially — mean passenger enplanements at VIA are up 87 percent this fiscal year compared to last year, and although March numbers from McAllen-Miller International Airport are not yet available, it seems likely that the Harlingen airport has surpassed McAllen’s facility in passenger numbers for the month.
“It was a great month but 40,000 knocked it out of the park,” Marv Esterly, director of aviation at VIA, told the airport board last week. “We suspect, and I haven’t seen the numbers from McAllen yet, but I suspect we’ll pass McAllen in March by a few thousand passengers.”
According to Transportation Security Administration boarding checks, in February McAllen enplaned 32,544 passengers, according to the airport’s 2022 activity report.
The reason for Esterly’s optimism is that in March, McAllen only had 38,000 available seats, and even if the load factor was 100 percent, they wouldn’t break 40,000.
“So if that number is correct, they’d have to have a 100 percent load factor to get 38,000, so I think unless something miraculous happens … we’ll finally get one up on them,” he said.
Brownsville-South Padre Island International Airport remained stable at about 10,000 passenger enplanements for March.
A large part of the reason for VIA’s growth when it comes to passengers has been the expansion of flights by Southwest Airlines, which has added three additional flights to make it seven flights per day. Another daily flight is scheduled to begin in June.
Southwest’s load factor, the percentage of seats that are sold per flight, was at 92 percent for March despite adding those additional flights in the market.
“Southwest Airlines gained in market share with the increase of aircraft and flights to 56 percent from 43 percent last year,” Esterly said. “American was at 16 percent and United was at 11 percent. Twelve percent for Sun Country. And 4 percent for Frontier, 1 percent up there is Viva Aerobus.”
Officials at the Harlingen facility believe the strong showing is in many ways attributable to Valley passengers’ desire to fly Southwest. What is called the Southwest “catchment area” ranges from Rio Grande City to South Padre Island and appears to be far larger than that of other airlines.
Southwest does not have flights from McAllen or Brownsville.
Then you had American airlines which just ocnitgnues to grow here, 22 percent over last year, 5,000 to 6,500 passenger.s Viva Aoerbus is down to two flights a week, they put 374 people on and Frontjier 1`,827, a high load factor for themn, and sun country who knoced it out of the park again this year even doining pobetter, 19 percent up over last year,.
We are 1`4 percetn up from pre pandemic numbers in March.
