Can Louisville Sustain a Direct West Coast Route?
tl;dr: LAX a yes with codeshare; BOS potentially a yes but likely too risky for either a scheduled charter or a codeshare
This past week both Insider Louisville and the Courier-Journal published details outlining a proposed incentive program, funded from both public and private sources, aimed at attracting an airline to add direct flights from Louisville to both Los Angeles and Boston. Fueled by other cities having success with similar programs (Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Nashville all have daily direct flights to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston), the group intends to provide a subsidy for an airline company to come in and expand service.
Columbus and Indianapolis both have about 200,000 more citizens in their cities than Louisville, though Nashville, Cincinnati, and Kansas City are reasonable comparisons with regard to population size. I’ll note here that all five of these cities also have a direct flight to San Francisco to boot. Additionally, an important note: every city with a direct connection to Los Angeles and Boston also has a direct flight to San Francisco, except for Buffalo, NY, which is coastal enough to be serviced by JetBlue for access to LA.
First, I’ll get this out of the way: Louisville is not too small of a city to warrant this level of access. Milwaukee, Kansas City, Cleveland, and Portland (OR) are all relatively similar in size and have at least one daily direct flight with a codeshare airline. However, there are more similarly-size cities without access than with, so Louisville appears early to the game on this initiative. For instance, Oklahoma City, Tucson, and Jacksonville are connecting through an airline hub just like the rest of us.
However, there’s a bigger issue regarding the number of people who actually travel to these destinations. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics publishes a quarterly survey for Airline Origin and Destination data that features purchased itineraries for commercial passengers. They only report 10% of the data, but trends are easily observable across a 15-month interval (and we’re doing a comparison, so we’re just looking at 10% of some apples versus 10% of some other apples). For this purpose I analyzed itineraries from January 2016 to March 2017. When I refer to Los Angeles, I’m intentionally combining adjacent airports (i.e. Ontario, CA), and I did the same with San Francisco (combined with SJC and OAK). Boston-Logan was studied alone.
On average throughout the year, Indianapolis and Nashville are moving 2–3x more people to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston at any given time. Cincinnati’s migrations are fairly similar to our own here in Louisville, with them benefiting from the Delta hub lifeline. Those numbers can make profitable flights.
But Louisville? Assuming (hopefully not too poorly) that 10% of the data is reasonably reflective of 100%, here’s the deal.
An average of about 88 travelers per day leave SDF bound for Boston. On the surface, that might be a good argument for a once-daily flight to Patriots territory, but since Louisville isn’t a hub, business travelers are frequently tied to one of three airlines: American, Delta, or United. If an airline managed to secure that roughly 1/3 of business travelers, that leaves about 30 people, which still isn’t a full cabin on the suckiest of regional jets (the ERJ-145 or CRJ-700), and omits the casual traveler who prefers the layover in Baltimore while flying Southwest.
As a comparison, Columbus and Indianapolis both average about 240 passengers/day to Boston. Nashville averages 310/day, Cincinnati is around 220/day.
With the reality that, only on the absolute best travel day, you might barely fill up the plane: a direct flight to Boston isn’t looking too feasible, at least not for a codeshare. But smaller outfits offer scheduled charters, typically on larger business jets that hold from 7–11 people, that could be a great fit for this route as those commuting are likely going to Boston as their final destination. The big issue here is that this route could be a viable one for a commercial flight, so a charter company is unlikely to risk that chance (they tend to target smaller routes that have a high unlikelihood of commercial competition). For those reasons, there’s a good chance the SDF-BOS direct flight isn’t going to appear right away.
But what about Los Angeles? At 1,600 nautical miles from Louisville, it’s too far for the standard ERJ-145 to travel (although the extended range “XR” model can make it), so we’re going to need more people making this route to sustain it with a larger aircraft. (And since they only have one bathroom on board, you wouldn’t want to fly that far on one anyway.) But that’s OK: LA is also a great connecting airport for Asia, Australia, Hawaii, and Baja, so an opportunity exists for more riders.
More people leaving Louisville travel to Los Angeles than San Francisco (to the tune of about 75 more people per day hitting up SoCal), so let’s start there and see where it takes us.
On average over the course of a year, there are around 142 travelers per day taking off from SDF and landing somewhere around Los Angeles. Assuming one codeshare has the route (i.e. American), and other passengers would just as well travel through Atlanta or Chicago to keep building up points on Delta and United, respectively, and also assuming a layover on Southwest in Las Vegas sounds awful, one airline might get to keep about 30% of those passengers, or around 43 of those initial 142 travelers each day.
To compare, Columbus has around 300 per day heading west to sort through, double Louisville’s numbers. Nashville has nearly 375/day, Indianapolis is 355/day. Cincinnati is at about 210/day, but again, that’s just departing from CVG; as a Delta hub, they’ll have connecting passengers who can help make up the difference.
There’s an argument that could be made that some business travelers are currently driving to Indianapolis or Northern Kentucky to access these direct flights, which is certainly valid. However, that drive (and dealing with a larger airport) will end up costing an additional two hours, which is about the length of a typical layover; any gains are minimal outside of attempting to reduce the chance of a late or canceled flight.
So what’s the verdict?
Of the top fifteen destinations that passengers from Louisville travel to, only one route isn’t direct: Los Angeles (at number 6 on the list).
Given the travel data above, comparables to similar cities, and the reality that it’s a prominent destination for Louisville travelers: a direct flight could absolutely be sustained.
(For those interested, the most popular destination is Orlando, and is followed by New York.)
Boston is a tougher sell. It sits at #16 on the destination list, but since it isn’t really a reasonable connection city (due to the flight time required to get there), there isn’t much opportunity for filling a plane with connecting passengers going to non-Boston destinations. Fewer travelers disembark in Houston, Charlotte, and Miami, but those are popular points for international travel.
San Francisco, again for those curious, sits at #17; a direct flight to LAX would be a great starting point here, particularly since a flight leaves LAX for SFO every hour. Not to belabor the point, though, but this is important: any city that can sustain an LAX route can (and does) sustain one to SFO.
Interestingly, when I started gathering this data, I didn’t have much expectation that either LAX or BOS would actually be candidates. Perhaps a “nice to have,” but not economically feasible. Now, however, I can say more definitively that Los Angeles is certainly a viable destination, and Boston isn’t completely out of the question.
CSV data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics was imported into a mySQL database for analysis. Data summations slogged through with a PHP script and pulled into a Google Sheet for ease. US population data comes from Wikipedia. Aircraft seat counts from SeatGuru.
P.S. If you can get the side of an ERJ-145 with the solo seat, it isn’t so bad.
