United to halt service at Palmdale airport
The airline says it was losing 'significant money.' The move is a setback for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan to revive a regional airport system to reduce load at LAX.
Dealing a setback to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan for a network of regional airports, United Airlines has decided to halt its service out of LA/Palmdale Regional Airport starting Dec. 7, city officials said today.
Los Angeles World Airports general manager Gina Marie Lindsey said United, the only major carrier at LA/Palmdale, was losing "significant money" on the initiative despite receiving government subsidies.
"Everybody's disappointed that it has not turned out to be more successful, but it was certainly a valiant effort," she said.
The pullout comes 15 months after Villaraigosa and other Los Angeles politicians stood on the tarmac in Palmdale to welcome United, hailing it as a sign that they were making headway in redistributing the passenger load away from LAX.
Within months, however, the airline was struggling to fill its twice-daily flights to San Francisco, with two out of every three seats going empty. A decision last month to switch to a smaller propeller plane -- and four flights per day -- did not help, Lindsey said.
The push to add flights at LA/Palmdale had been supported initially by a $900,000 grant from the federal government, airport officials said. That grant was not renewed this year.
Villaraigosa was not immediately available for comment. But in his letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation seeking more grant money, Villaraigosa said LA/Palmdale was off to a "promising start" and was pivotal to the effort to create a regional airport network.
"I consider the reopening of the LA/Palmdale [airport] to commercial jet service by United Airlines on June 7, 2007, one of the top accomplishments of my administration," he wrote.
Neighborhood leaders who live near LAX -- many of whom supported Villaraigosa in the 2005 election -- have argued that air traffic should be spread more evenly throughout the region. Villaraigosa responded by moving to resurrect the Southern California Regional Airport Authority, an agency that had been dormant for years.
That group went six months without a single meeting and pulled the plug in February.
One aviation consultant argued that United failed to properly market its service and should have courted the federal government employees traveling to and from nearby military bases. Once the federal grant dried up, United had no motivation to stay, said Jack Keady, an aviation consultant based in Playa del Rey.
