If you are holding a ticket for a commercial airline flight from Cleveland Hopkins or Akron-Canton airports you better not be late for your flight because it might be the only one of the day going where you’re going.
A check of the flight tracking website flightaware.com found that airline service at Northeast Ohio has withered to small numbers of flights.
On Saturday 27 commercial passenger flights landed at Hopkins and five landed at Akron-Canton.
Both figures are far below the traffic levels that each airport would have seen in early March before travel restrictions and stay at home orders seeking to stop the spread of the coronavirus kicked in and air travel fell a staggering 95 percent.
There might have been even fewer flights were it not for conditions imposed in a federal package of $50 billion in emergency aid to the nation’s airlines that they offer a skeletal level of service.
A review of flights that landed at Hopkins on Saturday, Friday and Thursday of last week found that much of that service was once or twice daily from hub airports including Atlanta, Chicago O’Hare, Chicago Midway, Nashville, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Washington Dulles, Charlotte, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, Denver and Detroit.
This represents a return to the hub and spoke days when major carriers primarily fed passengers to their fortress hubs with little point-to-point service.
On Saturday just one flight landed in Cleveland from O’Hare while two from O’Hare landed at Akron-Canton.
No flights landed in Cleveland on Saturday from Boston, New York-Newark, Dallas-Fort Worth or Orlando.
Over the three-day period, just one flight arrived in Cleveland from Boston and one from Newark.
There were no flights from New York LaGuardia, New York Kennedy or Washington’s Reagan-National airport.
On Friday, 22 flights landed at Hopkins while 27 landed on Thursday.
Over the three-day period, the most flights to Hopkins from any one city was four on Thursday from Chicago O’Hare.
Hopkins saw service from 23 airports over the three-day period, but 12 of those did not have service on all three days.
Service from Florida has been dramatically curtailed with no flights from Miami over the three days, two flights from Orlando (on Friday and Thursday), and single flights from Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Fort Myers and Sarasota.
Service from other cities included two flights from St. Louis and Milwaukee respectively. There was one flight from Baltimore.
A check of airline service at Akron-Canton Airport between Monday and Saturday found there was daily service from Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta and Philadelphia. There was service from Charlotte on all days except Thursday.
One most days, there was just one flight from all of those cities.
The total number of flights landing at CAK was four on Monday, seven on Tuesday, five on Wednesday, four on Thursday, six on Friday and five on Saturday.
The most flights that landed at Akron-Canton from any one airport was three on Friday from Charlotte.
Service from Atlanta was a single flight on all six days, a Delta Air Lines 737 that arrives between 9 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.
That same aircraft departs the next morning between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. for Atlanta.
That Delta is using a larger jet on the route is surprising. On many routes diminished bookings have led carriers to assign regional jets with smaller seating capacities that are flown under contract by another airline.
Even before the pandemic, the vast majority of flights to CAK operated in this manner under such brands as American Eagle and United Express flying on behalf of American Airlines and United Airlines respectively.
Service from Philadelphia to Akron-Canton was one flight a day except on Tuesday when two flights operated.
Charlotte service has ranged from one flight (Saturday, Wednesday and Monday) to three flights on Tuesday.
Spirit Airlines has suspended service to Akron-Canton, apparently using the rational that because it is close to Cleveland it is still serving CAK through Hopkins.
But Spirit was rebuffed last week by the U.S. Department of Transportation for an exemption that would have allowed it to temporarily suspend service to Cleveland.