HARLINGEN — Valley International Airport continued its strong passenger numbers, bumping up against 40,000 enplanements in June, nearly matching the strong numbers the airport last put up 15 years ago.
“These numbers again, like I said earlier, we haven’t seen since 2008,” Marv Esterly, director of aviation at VIA, told the board last week. “You see Southwest Airlines in June of this year, last month, 26,168. There have been plenty of months since I got here in 2015 that we didn’t exceed that with all the airlines.”
“Southwest Airlines doubled the seat capacity in our market, going back to their roots,” he added. “We were part of their roots, actually the fourth city in their triangle map. So they go back to their roots and are really concentrating on the Rio Grande Valley and that’s been really good.”
This year, Southwest dramatically increased the number of available seats in the market, pushing the number of flights to eight per day. That has allowed Southwest to go from having about 55 percent of market share in 2021 to 70 percent in June.
Southwest for the year is up 119.2 percent in the number of enplanements, a robust number only bettered by Frontier Airlines, which has used its in-demand flights to and from Orlando and Las Vegas to increase its enplanements by 305 percent over June 2021, although at 2,584 passengers, it remains far below Southwest.
But the good times may not last. Esterly said Frontier, like United Airlines and American Airlines, also is having issues fielding enough pilots and crew members and expects to reduce flight frequencies.
“There are some storm clouds on the horizon when it comes to air service,” Esterly said.
VIA has six airlines flying in and out of the airport, down from seven, with the recent departure of Mexico carrier Viva Aerobus. Delta Air Lines offers seasonal flights and currently is not flying to VIA.
“We did receive word that they’re also going to be a casualty of pilot and crew issues,” Esterly said of Frontier. “They said that they hope to be back as soon as they get these things straightened out, but again we’re not the only city.”
“All the airlines expanded so fast (coming out of the pandemic), and now they’re all contracting again because of pilot and crew issues,” Esterly said.
In June, VIA enplaned 38,898 passengers.
