Augusta Regional Airport leaders remain focused on bringing a third carrier to the Garden City and with that, service to the Windy City.
Members of the Airline Service Committee of the Aviation Commission were updated by Airport Executive Director Herbert Judon, Jr. A highlight of his presentation was a plan to seek a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). The Small Community Air Service Development Program (SCASDP) is designed to help smaller communities address air service and airfare issues.
He said this is the same grant the airport applied for a few years ago that helped launch the direct service to Washington, D.C.
“We want to compete for (SCASDP) again this year and 2025, getting ready to enter that federal fiscal year 2026,” he said. “We have been reaching out to the Department of Transportation multiple times this year to try to see when that grant will be out. And they keep putting it off. Every time we ask them, they’ll give us another date. They keep putting it off.”
Judon said, if they get the grant, it will be used to target a carrier to provide service to Chicago. To that end, he is also continuing meetings with airlines to discuss providing service to Augusta.
“We’ve got upcoming meetings with airlines, we’ve got virtual meetings,” he said. “I try to have semiannual meetings with the airlines. Two of those are coming up in the first week of November. I try to find a balance. I don’t want to be out of sight because I think if you’re out of sight, it hurts you with the airlines. But you also don’t want to be overbearing. So, I try to find that balance of communicating with the airlines.”
Judon also briefed committee members on the growth the airport has seen over the past year.
“We’re trending this year to probably about 335 to 340 enplanements for Augusta. So that’s good for us. It’s right around the record for us,” he said. “If you fly out of Augusta, you notice most of our planes are full. You probably heard me say that one of the negatives about our market is that we have less seats per our population than a lot of our peer cities, so that’s the challenge that we’re trying to overcome.”
Load factor is the percentage of passengers on the planes arriving and departing. Judon said Delta’s move to add the mainline service, which is service by Delta itself, rather than using the regional carriers, is a factor in the growth pattern.
Next on the horizon that will increase usage at Augusta Regional is the additional direct flight to Dallas-Fort Worth that American Airlines is adding.
“We’ll have a morning launch. This new one will be about seven o’clock in the morning. And then there’s a turn that comes from Dallas about 3:30-4:30 in the afternoon,” he said. “That helps us significantly. That’s one of the things I was hearing from a lot of customers, a lot of passengers that needed to either go to Dallas or needed to connect for a westward flight that they didn’t have a morning option.”
Currently, Augusta has about 30% so-called “leakage”, or potential passengers traveling to other cities, like Atlanta and Columbia, to fly. Judon believes the additional American Airlines flight will address that, with more choosing to fly out of Augusta. That service to DFW will begin on October 7th.
