Ultimate Air Resumes Cleveland Flights

Northeast Ohio-based Ultimate Air Shuttle has resumed flights between Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland and Cincinnati Lunken Airport.

The carrier, which is based at Akron-Canton Airport resumed flying the route last month after suspending service in mid 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimate operates as an air charter carrier offering public charters.

In other airline news, Spirit Airlines has begun a route between Akron-Canton Airport and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The flights do not operate every day. Spirit also links CAK and Orlando and has winter and spring seasonal service to Tampa and Fort Myers.

At Cleveland Hopkins Airport, Frontier Airlines plans to start flying to Atlanta on June 11.

The quad-weekly flights will have plenty of competition as the route is also served by Delta, Southwest and Spirit airlines.

Frontier is currently flying from Cleveland to Orlando, Fort Myers, Tampa, Miami and Sarasota in Florida, plus Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Cancun.

Elsewhere in Ohio, airlines continue to resume flights suspended during the pandemic.

John Glenn Columbus airport has regained flights on American Eagle to New York LaGuardia Airport and to Boston on Delta Connection.

Spirit will begin service in early June from Columbus to Los Angeles and Pensacola, Florida, while Southwest Airlines will begin service to Myrtle Beach on June 6.

Cleveland Hopkins Airport Director Robert Kennedy said the airport is at 50 percent of the passenger traffic it had in 2019 but expressed optimism that summer travel will boost business.

Hopkins expects to handle between 5.2 million to 5.9 million passengers this year, well below the 10.5 million projected at the beginning of 2020, but better than the 4 million handled last year.

Akron-Canton Airport handled nearly 10,000 passengers during March, a 63 percent drop compared with March 2019, but well better than the 85.3 percent decline in June 2020 compared with June 2019.

Air Service Ticking up at Akron-Canton Airport

Two airlines serving Akron-Canton Airport added additional service this week to their existing routes.

American Eagle is ramping up service to Charlotte to as many as four roundtrips a day and adding another flight to Philadelphia.

United Express added a roundtrip to Chicago O’Hare.

Both carriers had been operating just one roundtrip a day to those destinations for the past several weeks.

Spirit Airlines has boosted its service to Orlando to daily from three times a week.

Airport officials say service is expected to increase further in August when American Eagle resumes serving Chicago O’Hare, New York LaGuardia and Washington Reagan airports.

Delta Airlines and its commuter brand Delta Connection are not expected to resume flying between Akron-Canton and Atlanta until March 2021.

Suspended service by United Express to Houston is slated to return in October and Spirit is expected to resume seasonal service to Tampa and Fort Myers in November.

United Express is projecting launching service to Washington Dulles Airport in August.

Airport CEO Ren Camacho said daily air travel through CAK had dropped to as low as 100 passengers a day compared to the normal 2,000 a day during the depths of the pandemic.

Air travel has been picking up although it is still well below normal summer levels.

Camacho said much of the increase in travel has been leisure travelers with business travel not having picked up as much.

In an unrelated development, Ultimate Air Shuttle plans to resume its service between Cleveland’s Burke Lakefront Airport and Cincinnati Lunken Airport on July 20.

The 42-minute public charter flights operate twice daily on weekdays. It is the only scheduled commercial service at Burke.

The Cleveland-Cincinnati route is the first one bring brought by Ultimate, which is a division of Ultimate JetCharters in North Canton.

CAK Seeking Funds to Win Back Air Service

Akron-Canton Airport continues to see just three flights to three destinations and is seeking funding to try to entice airlines to reinstate service suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Airport officials are hoping to get a portion of the $10 million fund established by JobsOhio to regain air service lost during the pandemic.

In recent weeks, CAK has averaged 100 passengers a day on single daily flights to Philadelphia, Charlotte and Chicago (O’Hare).

Airport President Ren Camacho said in a presentation to the Stark County Port Authority that local matching funds are needed in order to tap funds from the JobOhio air service restoration fund.

If Akron-Canton can secure $100,000 in local money it would be matched by $400,000 from JobsOhio.

“Travel is slowly resuming,” Camacho said. “We are limited by capacity at this point.”

Before the pandemic, CAK averaged 25 flights a day. Last year the airport handled 830,000 passengers, an average of more than 2,200 a day.

This year, the Akron-Canton Airport is on a pace to lose $2.9 million although some of that will be offset by $7.6 million from the federal CARES Act.

Camacho wants local chambers of commerce and other economic development groups in the Akron-Canton area to make “airline incentive partnership” donations.

CAK officials are hoping to entice back service to New York (LaGuardia), Atlanta, Houston and Orlando that existed before the pandemic began.

The local and JobsOhio funding could be used for seat and revenue guarantees and marketing dollars.

Thus far no local agency has agreed to donate any funds to CAK.

JobsOhio To Fund Quest for New Airline Service

An Ohio economic develop agency is earmarking $4 million to help the state’s larger airports attract more airline service.

JobsOhio said the money can be used to attract new flights to unserved or underserved markets, including, transatlantic service from Cleveland and Columbus.

Officials said the funds could also benefit the Akron-Canton Airport, which has seen a decline in service in recent years and the Youngstown-Warren Airport, which lost commercial airline service in early 2018.

Ohio airports have been lobbying the Ohio legislature without success in recent years to create a fund to help attract new air service.

They have said Cleveland and Columbus are at a disadvantage compared with Pittsburgh and Indianapolis, which have used public funding to attract service to Europe.

Pittsburgh used $4 million in public funding to lure British Airways into creating a route to London while Indianapolis landed a Delta Air Lines route to Paris with the help of $5.5 million.

Cleveland Hopkins Airport officials say they believe they have lost out on some service opportunities because they lack funding to entice a carrier to launch new service.

Federal law prohibits direct funding of air service, but airports can waive certain fees, provide revenue guarantees and use public money to help airlines pay marketing costs.

Speaking to the City Club of Cleveland, J.P. Nauseef, president and chief investment officer of JobsOhio, said buying airline service is an economic development issue.

Nauseef said he’s heard business leaders throughout the state say, “If we had better air service, we could attract more people. If we had better air service, we could bring another division here. If we had better air service, Ohio would stay on the list with Texas and Florida for business growth.”

Nauseef said details about how the air service fund will operate are still being written, but there is likely to be some local matching funds requirement, including support from the business community.

The Greater Cleveland Partnership offered an undisclosed amount of financial assistance to Wow Air, which flew for six months in 2018 between Cleveland and Reykjavik, Iceland.

That same year Icelandair also provided service on the same route.

Wow Air is now out of business and Icelandair decided not to continue its service to Cleveland into 2019.

Cleveland and Columbus were said by JobsOhio to be two of the largest air travel markets to be without non-stop airline service to Europe.

JobsOhio is a private, nonprofit economic development group that is funded primarily through revenue from liquor sales in the state.

United Ending, Adding Flights From Cleveland

United Airlines will end service between Cleveland and Milwaukee on June 7, but intends to increase service to Houston and to Orlando, Florida.

The carrier said the Milwaukee route was not meeting its expectations, but did not elaborate.

The route has been flown with 50-seat regional jet service under the United Express brand.

United plans in November to add a sixth daily flight from Cleveland to Houston and to add a second Saturday flight to Orlando.

Service to Milwaukee from Cleveland will continue with Southwest Airlines, which began offering twice-daily service last November using Boeing 737 equipment.

Cleveland Hopkins Traffic Rose 8.5% in 2017

Passenger traffic at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport in 2017 was 9.14 million, which was the highest level since 2011.

Airport Director Robert Kennedy said the increased traffic was due to airline route expansion, the addition of a new airline last February (Allegiant Air), lower fares and a greater emphasis on customer service at the airport.

“If I had been here in 2014 and you would have told me that in three years we would surpass our traffic from the hub days, I wouldn’t have taken that bet,” he said.

Kennedy was referencing the fact that United Airlines closed its hub in Cleveland in 2014. United was the only carrier serving Hopkins that reduced its capacity there in 2017.

The 2017 passenger count at Hopkins was 8.5 percent greater than the 8.42 million who flew out of the airport in 2016.

However, the 2017 figure is far short of the 13.29 million who used the airport in 2000.

Airport officials say that unlike the days when Hopkins was a hub for United and, before that, a hub for Continental Airlines, nearly 96 percent of the traffic today originates in Cleveland.

During the hub days, much of the traffic was passing through the airport on connecting flights.

Kennedy noted that fares from Cleveland have fallen 30 percent since United closed its hub there.

He predicted that passenger traffic in 2018 would reach 9.5 million this year and 10 million in 2019.

This year will mark the resumption of service to Europe. In May Wow Air and Icelandair will launch flights between Cleveland and Reykjavik, Iceland.

Two other airports serving Ohio also saw passenger gains last year.

Pittsburgh International Airport served 8.99 million passengers in 2017, up 8.2 percent over 2016 while Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport served 7.8 million passengers in 2017, up 16 percent over 2016.

Last Allegiant Youngstown Flight Leaves Today

Allegiant Air will fly from the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport today for the final time.

The low fare carrier has cited low boardings for ending flights from Youngstown.

The last Allegiant flight is expected to lift off at 5:37 p.m. en route to Clearwater International Airport in Florida.

Allegiant, which began flying into the Youngstown-Warren airport in 2006, is the last carrier to provide scheduled service there.

However, airport officials have said they are talking with other potential carriers about providing flights.

Officials of one of those carriers, Southern Airways Express, attended a public forum last month to gauge interest in providing service to Baltimore-Washington International Airport and Detroit’s Coleman A. Young International Airport.

Dan Dickten, director of aviation for the Western Reserve Port Authority, which runs the Youngstown airport, has also talked with SkyWest Airlines and Sun Country Airlines about serving Youngstown.

Sun Country has provided charter flights from Youngstown and Dickten said there’s a possibility it may begin low-cost commercial flights similar to those of Allegiant or Spirit Airlines.

“Things like this just don’t happen overnight,” Dickten said. “There will be a break in service before we are able to get a new service in here.”

In the meantime, the airport authority has sued Aerodynamics Inc., which briefly operated scheduled flights between Youngstown and Chicago in summer 2016 before abruptly terminating the service.

ADI, which operated the service under the brand name Great Lakes JetExpress, has countersued the airport.

The trial in those cases is expected to begin next August at the U.S. Courthouse in Youngstown.

CAK Closes Lot, Loses Las Vegas Flights

Airline service cutbacks at Akron-Canton Airport have led to the closing of a remote parking lot.

The affected lot is the 750-space economy lot off Lauby Road across from the Hilton Garden Inn on one side and Timken’s corporate headquarters on the other.

It was one of the airport’s least expensive parking facilities, charging $3 an hour; $7 daily; and $42 a week. Shuttle buses took passengers to and from the terminal.

Airport officials said demand for the lot dropped considerably after Southwest Airlines discontinued service from CAK last June.

The airport has found that an increasing number of passengers, particularly those who fly on low fare carrier Spirit Airlines, are having family or friends drop them off at the terminal rather than parking at the airport while they are gone.

Akron-Canton has seen its passenger volume fall 4 percent this year when compared with this time in 2016. This past October, the monthly passenger numbers were down 14 percent.

Airport President Rick McQueen expects passenger volume to stabilize in 2018 and begin growing again in 2019.

In the meantime, CAK has lost another destination with Spirit Airlines discontinuing service to Las Vegas.

The company cited disappointing patronage. “Unfortunately, the CAK/LAS service didn’t meet our financial performance requirements to make it sustainable,” said Spirit spokesman Stephen Schuler.

Spirit continues to fly between CAK and four airports in Florida, including Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and Fort Myers.

The flights to Las Vegas from CAK, which began last April, had a load factor of 80 percent, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

That was slightly better than the overall load factor for Spirit at Akron-Canton of 79 percent for the first seven months of 2017.

CAK, though, trailed the Spirit systemwide load factor during that time period of 84 percent.

At Cleveland Hopkins Airport, Spirit’s load factor was 83 percent during the first seven months of 2017.

Spirit said recently that it will begin flying from John Glenn Columbus International Airport to seven destinations. Service starts in February with flights to Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Fort Myers, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Myrtle Beach.

Ultimate Ends Burke-NYC Flights

Ultimate Air Shuttle cited low traffic for suspending its flights between Cleveland’s Burke Lakefront Airport and New York City six weeks after they began.

The carrier based in North Canton said it would instead launch service from Burke to Atlanta on March 20. Those flights will have an intermediate stop in Cincinnati.

Ultimate had flown to Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

The Atlanta service is slated to use DeKalb-Peachtree Airport rather than Hartsfield International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world.

Rick Pawlak, Ultimate Air’s managing director, said the carrier expects to resume Burke-New York service but did not give a timeline for that to happen.

Ultimate Air Shuttle Begins Burke-NYC Service

Ultimate Air Shuttle began service this week between Cleveland’s Burke Lakefront Airport and the New York City Area.

The flights depart Burke at 10:45 a.m. and arrive at 9:42 a.m. The service is via an airport in Morristown, New Jersey.

The carrier said it will also plans to begin service between Burke and Atlanta although it has not yet announced a start-up date.

Flights to Atlanta will involve an intermediate stop in Cincinnati, and land at Dekalb-Peachtree Airport, located 10 miles south of downtown Atlanta.

Rick Pawlak, managing director of the Ultimate, said the service is pending approval of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Ultimate began service between Burke and Cincinnati Lunken Airport in October 2015. It was the first scheduled air service from Burke in nearly 10 years.

Flights are operated with Ultimate’s fleet of 30-seat Dornier 328 jets and a 30-seat Embraer 135 jet.