Columbia airport is losing more summer flights than most of US. But there’s more to the story
Columbia Metropolitan Airport was second in the country on a Bloomberg list of airports cutting flights for summer travel this year. Only Jackson, Mississippi, has had a higher percentage of its summer flights reduced from what was initially planned in January, according to an analysis of summer flight data by Bloomberg.
The Bloomberg data shows Columbia’s airport offering 13.8% fewer seats than what was planned in January – the second-highest percentage cut in the country. That translates to more than 32,000 seats being cut from the airport’s summer flight schedule from what was planned in January, according to Bloomberg.
But those numbers only paint part of a picture, Columbia Metropolitan Airport spokesperson Kim Crafton explained.
The Columbia airport is on track to surpass 1.38 million passengers this year, which it previously estimated would take until 2028 to reach that many annual passengers, Crafton said via email. The airport hit its previous record of 1.35 million passengers in 2019, before dipping during the pandemic. In 2023, it served 1.23 million passengers.
But the airport has still been affected by a nationwide trend of airlines reducing flights this summer, driven largely by United and Delta airlines, which both operate in Columbia.
Nationwide, airlines have cut more than 6 million seats across airports that reach at least 100,000 passengers between June and August. The South has been the most affected, with more than two-thirds of those cut seats being for flights to or from Southern airports, according to the Bloomberg analysis.
Greenville will have 7.4% fewer seats and Myrtle Beach will have 7% fewer seats this summer than previously scheduled, according to Bloomberg.
Delta, United and American airlines operate at the Columbia airport, and all of those airlines have cut flights from their summer schedules.
Nationwide, Delta has reduced seats by 2.3 million for its June through August flight schedules, and United has cut 1.4 million seats, according to Bloomberg’s analysis. American Airlines has cut 1 million seats for that timeframe.
Earlier this year, United Airlines asked pilots to take time off in May because they simply did not have enough airplanes to meet demand, according to the Associated Press. The shortage of airplanes has partly been driven by Boeing delivering fewer new planes, the AP reporting also noted.
Indeed, United Airlines is offering 3,164 fewer seats this summer than it did last summer in Columbia. But Delta is actually providing 7,488 more seats than it offered at the Columbia airport between June and August 2023.
Year over year, the airport is seeing 4,324 more available seats between those two airlines than it did last summer, Crafton said. American and Delta are also offering more flights than they did last summer from Columbia. American is up 79 flights and Delta is up 64 flights between June and August of this and last year, Crafton added. United is down 33 flights.
This story was originally published May 31, 2024 at 10:20 AM.
