HARLINGEN — Strong demand for seats in the Harlingen market has airlines submitting plans for additional flights to and from Valley International Airport.
The airport averages about 15 commercial passenger flights a day at present, but both American Airlines and United Airlines have filed future schedule changes to increase their investment in the Harlingen market.
“I think the main highlight is that American is bringing back the fourth and the fifth frequencies, especially back to four by the last quarter of 2022,” said Nicolas Mirman, director of air service and business development at VIA. “And the fifth should be coming in during the first half of 2023.”
“They should be flying back to four times a day to Dallas by November and five by late 2023,” he added. “At least that is their intention.”
American at present has three daily flights to and from VIA out of Dallas-Fort Worth. United has plans to go from three flights per day to four to and from Houston.
Mirman stresses these flight schedules are tentative. And since this is the “Summer of the Canceled Flight,” it remains to be seen whether airlines can hire and train enough pilots and crew to meet passenger demand in certain markets.
While flight cancellations have not been a problem at VIA, the same cannot be said for airlines elsewhere.
Last week on Thursday, air travel was in near-chaos, with more than 1,200 U.S. flights canceled, and then another 452 were scrapped on Friday, according to FlightAware, which tracks airline flights worldwide.
Southwest had the most flights canceled Thursday, with 356 flights erased and another 1,734 delayed, about 40 percent of the airline’s total. Southwest officials blamed a computer glitch in Phoenix.
On Saturday, airlines canceled 657 U.S. flights and more than 1,400 were delayed. On Sunday, 900 flights were canceled.
Many of the latter cancellations and delays were weather-related.
Mirman said the bright side is that the airline industry is finally recovering from the downturn related to COVID-19 shutdowns and slowdowns and passenger ticket demand is surging.
“If you read at the national level you see a lot of cancellations and delays,” he said. “The latest trend is there are too many flights in the market and they don’t have enough pilots.”
“So they have been training a lot, and they have been exiting markets completely,” he added. “United has exited 21 stations. They don’t fly to 21 stations that they used to fly to before.”
An adequate number of pilots and flight crews has been of concern to not just airlines but VIA officials as well for the past few months.
Mirman believes the airline industry is working to solve the personnel issues, although the extent of the problem has been revealed during peak travel time this summer.
“As they start getting the crews back, as they get more pilots trained or maybe pilots were supposed to retire and they don’t, as they start to normalize and they bring this capacity back, or at least they have the intention to bring it back sooner to Harlingen than to other places, that to us means we are a good market for them,” Mirman said.
“You wouldn’t prioritize a market that’s not performing for you,” he added.
Yet Mirman cautioned the proposed daily flight additions by American and United remain fluid and dependent on plugging staffing holes.
“As they get closer and they see if they truly have the crews or the planes to fly that schedule, they keep it,” Mirman said. “Sometimes they need to trim it and it’s at the last minute. So this could change.”
