Virgin America finds Love in Dallas, as www.planesintheair.com turns 1 year old. This is a re-post of this websites first story 12 months ago. Virgin America agreed to be acquired by Alaska Airlines earlier this month.
Virgin America Airlines was granted the use of two gates at Dallas Love Field by city officials back in May of 2014, following Justice Department approval the month prior, beating out opponents Delta and Southwest. Virgin had operated to Los Angeles and San Francisco with their single gate at D/FW, but expanded its service by adding flights to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after picking up their extra gate at Love. Virgin then added direct flights to New York’s LaGuardia Airport a couple weeks after starting the flights to National Airport.
This seems like a logical move, as operating out of Dallas Love Field should be more economical and efficient than operating from DFW. However, the recent announcement of additional flights from Love to Austin starting on April 28, 2015 had me scratching my head. Virgin will operate five daily nonstop flights from DAL to AUS, with “convenient” connecting service to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), San Francisco International Airport (SFO), and New York’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA). However:
Southwest Airlines already has 1 nonstop flight to DCA from Austin.
There are 12 nonstop flights from Austin to LAX between Southwest (2), United Airlines (3), American Airlines (4), and Delta Connection (3) combined.
United Airlines already has 5 nonstop flights to SFO + Virgin already has 2 nonstop flights to SFO from AUS.
There are no nonstop flights from Austin to New York’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA), but that includes Virgin Airlines.
This does not even includes the competing 1 stop flights from other airlines.
It doesn’t seem like connecting traffic in Dallas from Austin would be very efficient for travelers. I also don’t think that there are allot of people who fly from Austin where Dallas is their end destination. By the time you drive to the airport, park, get to security an hour early, wait for you flight (and hope it’s not delayed), deplane and get outside, you could have already driven there!
I guess only time will tell if Virgin America finds Love in Dallas.
On a separate note, Virgin America just announced that it will be adding flights to Hawaii with 1 daily departure to Honolulu starting on November 2, 2015. This will be followed by an additional daily departure to Kahului, Maui starting on December 3, 2015. Flights will be operated with new Airbus A320 aircraft. The flight schedule info is listed below:
Depart Arrive Frequency
SFO at 7:45 am HNL at 11:25 am Daily
HNL at 12:55 am SFO at 8:15 pm Daily
SFO at 7:55 am OGG at 11:40 am Tue, Sat, Sun
OGG at 1:10 pm SFO at 8:15 pm Tue, Sat, Sun
SFO at 6:05 pm OGG at 9:50 pm Mon, Wed, Thu, Fri
OGG at 11:20 pm SFO at 6:25 am* Mon, Wed, Thu, Fri
* Next day arrival
When looking at the scheduled flight times, the first thing that comes to mind is that it’s virtually impossible to connect any traffic to the 7:45 am departure from San Francisco to Honolulu! It’s also not going to feed 3 of the 7 currently scheduled flight to Kahului.
Why would you start new sercice to Hawaii, and not plan to connect feeder traffic to the other 70% plus of your available route schedule.
We will have to stay tuned to see if they modify this Hawaii schedule plan in the future.
Route map from www.virginamerica.com