Airline set to pull out of Columbia Airport for lack of passengers
An airline is ending their service at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport following a consistent lack of passengers, according to an airport spokesperson.
Just shy of a year, Allegiant Air is set to stop servicing the airport on May 4, according to airport spokesperson Kim Crafton. The airline began servicing the airport on May 15, 2025.
The airline’s decision was driven by “low load factors” — industry jargon for planes that are simply not carrying enough passengers to make money, Crafton said.
Airlines typically need load factors at or above 80 to 85 percent to meet performance expectations. On the Allegiant flights serving Columbia, Crafton said, the airline was seeing planes “consistently in the 40s and 50s.”
Allegiant’s departure will leave CAE with three airlines come May, including American, Delta and United airlines.
Crafton pushed back on a common refrain in online comments, in response to reporting by other outlets, that the airport “can’t keep an airline,” arguing that the dynamics are more basic and unforgiving.
“If this community doesn’t use it (the airline), they lose it,” she said.
Some residents linked Spirit’s departure from the airport to the same problem Allegiant faced, but Crafton said Spirit’s service had been performing strongly in the local market even as the company’s finances deteriorated. Spirit filed for bankruptcy twice in a year, she said, calling it “an airline issue” rather than a failure of local demand.
“We had very high load factors on our Spirit service,” she said, adding that some flights were “even oversold,” a sign of demand from passengers even as the carrier’s business troubles mounted.
Behind the numbers is a familiar tension in regional air travel. Residents often price-shop against larger airports and longer drives. If passengers can’t use Columbia’s airport due to prices set by the airline, Crafton urged, at minimum, they consider other South Carolina airports rather than “taking dollars outside of our state.”
