The airline must then operate service continuously for 180 days to finalize the allocation.“If any of these air carriers relinquish a slot, then we would go back to the other carriers that were interested in [additional] slots,” he adds. Alaska Airlines recently gave up five slots and United Parcel Service surrendered one of two. According to airport officials, this is the greatest number of available slots since JetBlue began service at LGB in 2001.
The airport uses various methods to determine allocation, depending on the available slots and total requests. The allocation process works in “rounds.” There is some preference to carriers new to LGB, Lopez-Rios says.“In the past there [have been] so many entrants, there aren’t enough to go around,” he says. “Then, in order to assign the slots, we go to a drawing.”For a drawing, the airport would designate a date so that representatives from each airline could attend.
The two guiding documents are the airport’s noise ordinance and the slot allocation resolution, says LGB Public Affairs Officer Sharon Diggs-Jackson.The noise ordinance currently caps commercial slots at 41 and commuter slots at 25. (Commuter slots are for aircraft less than 75,000 pounds.) Alaska’s subsidiary Horizon Air now operates at LGB, using commuter slots because of its smaller planes. There are still 16 commuter slots available.Airserv President Kevin McAchren says new airlines could translate into new business: “We could use the business,” he says. “It’s been terribly slow for us.”
(Stacy Lawrence - Long Beach Business Journel)
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