ITHACA, NY – Despite its “centrally isolated” location away from major interstates, Ithaca will now be the primary Southern Tier regional hub for one of the major airline services, American Airlines.
The airline recently announced it’s intention to stop service to Elmira and Binghamton airports, making Ithaca the primary hub for the region. The move is part of American Airline’s “rebanking” of its flights out of Philadelphia, which is a major international hub.
United Airlines also ended its service to Elmira earlier in the year and will be ending service to Binghamton next month as well. That means Ithaca is now the only regional airport getting service from these two major airlines.
So what does this change mean for Ithaca?
For one thing, it means the airport will start accommodating more passengers.
“In a couple of months, we’ll have a fairly substantial majority of the seats in and out of the Southern Tier. Our challenge is to fill those seats,” says airport manager Mike Hall. “It gives us an opportunity to solidify and build, and if we’re able to do that then our future is very much what we envisioned.”
While this is a good opportunity for the airport, Hall predicts that it won’t necessarily have a huge impact in terms of attracting people who used to fly through Binghamton and Elmira. For someone in Binghamton, the travel time to Ithaca is effectively the same to Syracuse or Allentown, Pennsylvania, so people may opt for an easier drive along the interstate. That’s less true for Elmira, but people may still opt toward Syracuse for the more robust service options at the larger airport.
“The big thing is taking care of our market. We actually have a situation where up until now we’ve had more demand than seats, which causes tickets to be slightly higher, and more people wanted to fly than we had seats, so this will help address that.”
Another change coming to Ithaca airport is a changeover to jet planes, which Hall says people prefer over the turboprops that currently fly, because they are newer and seen as more reliable. Hall says that by 2017, it’s expected that all planes out of Ithaca will be jets, flying to the same hubs it currently serves: Philadelphia, Detroit and Newark. The airport is also currently pursuing a project to build a second jetway to accommodate the change.
Along with that, as older planes age out of service, Hall says it’s expected that we’ll see larger planes in Ithaca from the current 50-seat RJs (regional jets) to 65-seat planes.
While the precise impacts are still speculative, Hall is optimistic about the opportunities for ITH as the new flagship of the Southern Tier.
(Featured photo courtesy of Jason O’Halloran on Flickr)