IN-DEPTH: Exploring Abilene’s standing in airport industry with insight from Air Service Strategy Director Martin Kammerman
ABILENE, Texas (KTAB/KRBC) – Have you ever wondered how Abilene stands in relation to the airport industry? In a two-part series, BigCountryHomepage will delve into the bolts and nuts of the airport industry, both locally and nationally.
In this segment, Air Service Strategy and Development Director Martin Kammerman shared his insight on working with various airlines, the outlook of Abilene Regional Airport, and how it stands in relation to other airports at the February 14th Airport Development Board Meeting.
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Kammerman has worked primarily in a network planning role with various airlines, including US Airways, United, and Continental Airlines. He has been working with ASM, a global consultancy that has provided route development support services for airports and stakeholders since 1993.
“Network planning at airlines are the people that go through the analysis and the process of making decisions as to which flights should be in the network, what should be added in, things to be canceled, what to do in cases of challenges or other issues, what to do with mergers and all that kind of good stuff,” Kammerman said. “We do analysis and build business cases for why this or that route should exist. And then we often will talk to a community like I’m doing right now to talk about how things have changed and evolved over time and what opportunities might exist, not just from the airport perspective but also from the wider community and the airport’s partner perspective.”
He added that when it comes to planning, it’s not always about what the best new route is.
“We also play defense on certain routes. We’re not always looking for what’s the best new route; it’s often how we keep what we have. And that’s one of the areas in which we’ve had a good amount of success over the last few years here in Abilene. In terms of the ability that we have, there’s definitely room for alternatives. But at the same time, in our discussions with American, who’s our single carrier here, we’ve managed to maintain a reasonable level of seat departures and connections to what ultimately is the third biggest hub in the world, which is Dallas,” Kammerman said.
There are many challenges to this process, such as:
Hub Centric Airlines
The new route may not align with the target airline hub and spoke strategy.
The route may have the traffic demand, but the airline doesn’t want to overfly its hub(s)
Aircraft delivery delays
Industry, local, and global economics
Airline decision-maker and strategy changes
Cannibalization of new routes may have a negative effect on the airline’s existing flights.
Airports compete against airports, not just locally but globally, for airline capacity, which requires the airport to demonstrate why it will outperform others.
“So, aircraft delivery day delays, lately, have become a bigger issue. It’s been, you know, we had issues getting equipment and parts and labor during COVID. And some of this still exists today. That holds us back a bit from the overall aviation industry. There’s also local and global and state and federal economics and changes in laws. And these have an impact on what it is that we do and how we do it,” Kammerman said.
The catchment areas for Abilene are the zip codes that are shown in green in the graphic above. The darker the color, the higher the population density. The rings represent the drive time to the Abilene Regional Airport. The outer ring is 90 minutes, the middle is 60 minutes, and the smallest ring is 30 minutes.
22.1% of flyers are using ABI Regional to fly from departures, and the largest is DFW with 56.2%. The next is Dallas Love Feild Airport, with 11%.
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When people travel from our catchment area, most use American Airlines. However, Kammerman said this is not only from ABI Regional.
“It’s not because they’re flying American at ABI. If you were to break that large red American Airlines, part of the pie chart, part of it would be ABI, but the rest of it is people who are primarily driving to DFW, a tiny number going to Austin to fly American. The next biggest airline is Southwest, and that is mostly going to Dallas. Love, If you’re going to Austin, then other airlines like Spirit United and Delta, typically from DFW people driving, are flying those airlines. So these are good things to know and trying to understand what customers originate from here,” Kammerman said.
The next common question is, where do they go?
These are the top 25 destinations. The blue represents people using ABi Regional when they go to these destinations, and the red represents people who are using some other airport when they travel. At the top is Las Vegas, followed by Los Angeles, Denver, Orlando, and Chicago.
The Dallas Fort Worth is ranked 14th but has more blue than the rest. That is due to the fact there is nonstop service to go there. Occasionally, people will use other airports from other places, such as Midland, San Angelo, or Austin.
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This graph represents the seat capacity flying out each month, starting in January 2019. The orange in the middle represents a time when we briefly had United Service operated by SkyWest Airlines to Houston. He shared that ABI Regional is above the 2019 level of seat departures.
“We typically have about five flights a day. This varies slightly by the day of the week, but five a day. We used to have six a day. However, the six a day 150 seat, one cabin aircraft, and the five flights a day we have now [has] around 76 aircraft that have dual cabins,” Kammerman said. “This came in during COVID. It was an opportunity early on that the airport and SkyWest and United came together. And ultimately, it didn’t work out for reasons that are different than the way things normally work out… But one of the reasons that I include this information here is that even in the heart of the COVID period in early and mid-2021, we actually had more seats at that time, in part because there’s definitely higher demand in Abilene for people who could fly from here than actually would normally fly. My goal as someone in our service development is to find more ways to get more flights and more destinations here. Because clearly, there’s more demand if we have those seats and we have those flights available. And that period, during sort of the worst of times, is an interesting way to look at the data.”
This is a map of Texas airports, excluding a couple such as Dallas and Houston, to find ones that are similar in size to ABI. The graph on the right represents the seat size in February for each place. ABI had 10,529 seats and a 54% growth in seats since February 2019.
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Moving to a broader spectrum, the industry has seen many airlines merge.
“This is low-cost airlines that existed since 1978. There are 51 of them, and only a few, only nine still exist today. Airlines like Southwest and Vela, who’s new, and JetBlue has been around a while, and so on. But you’ll notice there’s a whole bunch of these here that existed at one point but have fallen off the map,” Kammerman said.
One of the biggest trends that affects an airport and a city like Abilene is business travelers.
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“The challenge we have is that in a pre-COVID context. The typical workers in the United States, about 7.2% of paid workdays were done remotely. That number peeked up substantially to 61% during the worst of COVID, when people weren’t traveling much at all. But while that number has improved and come back down, it’s still a lot higher than it used to be. And this is a negative in the airline business overall [and] for smaller communities that often have a business orientation, as Abilene does. People are traveling to and from here for friends and family, but also for business. But there aren’t that many people that are coming here for an amusement park or for a beach, for example. The percentage of people that are either fully remote or working hybrid in their employment is definitely higher than it used to be. And this seems to be having a negative effect on people traveling for business. Now, it has a positive effect on people traveling for leisure, but that at a lesser degree than the total,” Kammerman explained.
Another impact is the price of fuel. He shared that even though it’s a short flight from here to DFW, the price of fuel weighs heavily, especially on smaller aircraft.
“It’s sort of like if you have a car that has five seats in it and a school bus. The school bus uses more total gas, but if you have to have that many seats and that many cars, the amount of gas to use cars to fill up the same number of seats as a school bus makes a big difference. And so, the bigger aircraft are more efficient in terms of their ability to more effectively use fuel. We’ve had the worst times for jet fuel. And I would go so far as to say that the end of ’23 was not the best. But the trends for the last two months have actually been pretty good with fuel prices going down,” Kammerman shared.
Through the past few years, fleets of smaller aircraft have shrunk, making it more difficult to travel to places that cannot handle larger aircraft. In the graph, the flights with 1-37 seats and 38-50 seats were the most popular, but that trend has decreased. Today, the average aircraft in Abilene is 76 seats.
Abilene Regional Airport to receive bigger planes with less flights each day
Another issue is the lack of pilots. In 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed just outside of Buffalo in Clarence, NY, and killed 50 people. Since that crash, congress passed the Airline Safety and FAA Extension Act of 2010, which took effect in 2013.
“The biggest change that affected airlines and pilots was the fact that, in the past, to be a copilot, you needed at least 250 hours or more of time learning how to fly. And that number was from 250 to 1,500 hours. And that was a huge difference. What was odd about this was that both of the pilots on the Colgan flight had more than 1,500 hours and had been flying for many years. But from my perspective, as an analyst, the government basically said, ‘Well, we had a plane crash and people died. And it’s sad, we have to do something.’ And so what they may have been overdone in the 250 to 1,500. And so, when we then go and say, well, what’s the rest of the world doing? Well, the US leads in regulation for aviation. But this is one area where no other country has followed us and changed their regulatory system so that pilots for those countries have to go to 1,500 hours,” Kammerman said.
He mentioned that senior pilots were offered early retirement when COVID-19 emerged.
“When COVID began, a lot of airlines were not sure exactly how it was going to play out, offering early retirement, especially to some of the more senior pilots, those up until age 65. And so, when those pilots were out of the network, some of the most experienced people were gone. And ultimately, when things recovered, maybe quicker than some of the airlines might have expected, there were a lot less pilots that were available to fly. And so, the combination of those two things, primarily the regulatory change, that’s the biggest factor, not COVID, has made it so that when we look at the shortage of pilots, essentially from 2016 forward is what I have on the graph here. It’s definitely been a big deal,” Kammerman said. “That’s one of the reasons why airlines have gone to larger aircraft, essentially if that smaller aircraft still requires at least.
Two pilots every time, even if the plane has only 30 seats on it, that 757 that might hold 200 passengers also only needs two pilots. And so, to cope with those airlines, essentially, that’s one of the things that’s encouraged them to go with larger aircraft plus some of the other factors like fuel costs and other things that are part of the equation.
Keep a lookout for these topics in the next segment:
Ongoing discussions with United and their operator SkyWest
Could we go beyond DFW to another Hub with American Airlines?
Public comments and concerns
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