Home > ShortCuts > Archives > Airport/air travel category
Airport/air travel
January 26, 2009
Airport puts out what passes for good news these days . . .
Perhaps this is best characterized as good bad-news.
Austin-Bergstrom International Airport’s December passenger traffic was down 1 percent from December 2007. Bad, right? But compare it to the percentage drop in the previous months: November, 9 percent; October 2.5 percent; September, 6 percent.
It starts to look like a rally, in that context. Or it could mean that while business travel has been waylaid by the recession (or whatever it is being called at the moment), Christmas travel is mostly immune. But wouldn’t Thanksgiving traffic be similarly immune?
So maybe it is good news.
For the year, ABIA’s passenger traffic was still up 2 percent, mostly thanks to the very healthy first seven months of the year.
Air cargo, by the way, was off 16 percent in December versus the previous December and down 4 percent for the year as a whole. That would amount to bad, bad-news.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Airport/air travel
July 23, 2008
ABIA shrugs off aviation industry woes, sets another record in June
You don’t have to be paying much attention to see stories about airline layoffs and dropped routes. But that trend, at least so far, hasn’t hurt the Austin airport.
Austin-Bergstrom International Airport had 869,308 passengers in June, airport officials report, up 8.5 percent over last June. This is a record for any month, breaking the July 2007 record of 832,455.
Year-to-date, the 4,551,830 boardings and landing passengers is 6 percent higher than the same six months in 2007. The top carrier was Southwest Airlines, with 1.6 million passengers, up 8 percent from 2007.
Even air cargo, which slumped here for a couple of years, has been doing better. Year-to-date, the 105.5 million pounds moved through Austin is 4.5 percent over the same period in 2007.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Airport/air travel
February 20, 2008
Vulture gets wedged in jet nose cone
Delta,1; Vulture, 0
A Delta Airlines jet landed safely Monday afternoon at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
So, where’s the news? Well, what’s interesting about the conclusion of Delta 1877 from Atlanta is that the plane landed with a black vulture embedded in the nose cone. The bird, which most of us would probably call a buzzard if we saw it aflight, ran head-on into the nose of the plane about five miles south of ABIA, airport spokesman Jim Halbrook said.
Apparently, Halbrook said, the bird dented the nose cone in such a way that it became wedged in a seam between the cone and the fuselage. There it remained.
Officials issued an Alert 2 and scrambled fire trucks, Halbook said. But the plane and its 140 passengers landed without further incident or any injuries. Other than to the unfortunate vulture, of course.
The plane remains in Austin, Halbrook said. And the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident, according to Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Roland Herwig. Halbrook could not confirm a report that the bird’s remains had been put on ice to somehow aide in the investigation.
Bird strikes have been something of a problem south of the airport, where plane flight paths cross over two landfills.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Airport/air travel
January 28, 2008
Another year, another record at airport
Who knows what 2008 will bring, what with nationwide recession threatening us all with its bony grip. But in 2007, at least, Austin’s continuing economic health meant another boom year at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Given recent experience — passenger growth, new airlines coming aboard and new route announcements almost weekly — airport officials have begun studying expansion of the airport.
Passenger traffic for the year was 8.89 million, the airport said today, up 7.55 percent from 2006. That’s the fourth year in a row of growth since a three-year slide caused by the last recession and the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Overall, airport traffic has increased 46.5 percent since 1998, the last full year at Robert Mueller Municipal Airport.
Here are passenger traffic totals (boardings and de-planings) at Mueller and Bergstrom (which opened in May 1999) since 1998:
1998: 6,065,973 up 3.0%; 1999: 6,670,851 up 10.0%; 2000: 7,658,671 up 14.8%: 2001: 7,199,322 down 6.0%; 2002: 6,720,618 down 6.6%; 2003: 6,707,081 down 0.2%; 2004: 7,238,645 up 7.9%; 2005: 7,683,545 up 6.1%; 2006: 8,261,310 up 7.5%; 2007: 8,885,391 up 7.6%.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Airport/air travel
November 19, 2007
ABIA still OK despite Dallas-Fort Worth problems
Flights at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport remain primarily on time today, according to the airport’s Web site, despite communications problems at DFW and some hints of weather problems elsewhere in the United States.
The radio outage at DFW, which occurred about 7 a.m., according to the Associated Press, delayed flights by about an hour there. But it was fixed by mid-morning. Fog through Atlanta pushed back flights about a half hour, the AP said.
However, the real problems could come Wednesday, typically the heaviest air travel day of the year. Winter storms are predicted for the Upper Midwest — meaning Chicago O’Hare Airport — and in the Northeast. Perhaps grandma should move south.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Airport/air travel
