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Air Force
To land Southwest, Bradley officials convinced the airline to bake a bigger pie
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Business New Haven
8/9/1999
By: Michael C. Bingham
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To the Hartford Courant, it was a "boon" to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, which becomes the largest Northeastern airport to be served by price-busting Southwest Airlines. To the New Haven Register, it was a "blow" to Tweed-New Haven Airport, which might have turned its fortunes around in a single stroke by landing the low-cost carrier. To air travelers in Connecticut, it meant simply the promise of $200 round-trip flights to and from the West Coast.
Whatever the perspective, the arrival of Southwest to Bradley with 12 daily flights beginning October 31 was big news. The airline's arrival in Connecticut is expected to draw passengers from as far away as northern New Jersey and Vermont, and in the process generate substantial increases in passenger traffic at the state's largest airport.
The regional carrier was born with a cocktail-napkin sketch in 1971. Today it ranks fourth among U.S. carriers in annual passenger volume. Last year it posted record earnings of $433 million on revenues of $4.2 billion.
Southwest presently serves 55 cities in 29 states, operating more than 2,400 flights daily. Introduction of Southwest service to T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, R.I. - and to a lesser extent Manchester, N.H. - provided a major boost in passenger traffic, especially to air travelers seeking an alternative to ever-congested Logan International Airport in Boston.
For state officials, the successful wooing of Southwest represents a major coup whose economic benefits could approach what might have been expected from the hoped-for relocation of the New England Patriots to a new stadium at Adriaen's Landing in Hartford.
But it certainly took some wooing. Robert F. Juliano, who heads the Bureau of Aviation & Ports for the state's Department of Transportation (which operates Bradley), describes an on-again, off-again courtship with Southwest over a period of years, a courtship which began to heat up in earnest only last November.
For Bradley, the key issue lay not in competing with Providence or Manchester, but in baking a bigger pie for all - including Southwest. "Even though there's been speculation that we lost tons and tons of traffic to Providence, when we looked at the [1998] numbers our passenger traffic was up almost four percent [over 1997]," Juliano says. So his staff put together "a complete package on the benefits of Bradley for Southwest - in addition to operating at Providence and New Hampshire."
In published reports Southwest Chairman and CEO Herbert D. Kelleher said that both the raw population numbers in the Hartford-Springfield market as well as population's high income profile helped sway his decision to add a third New England destination. But he also cites the study Juliano's staff put together late last year, which "demonstrat[ed] fairly conclusively that there would not be all that much self-diversion [of existing Southwest passengers from Providence to Bradley]."
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