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Old 08-27-2005, 07:55 AM
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bluebird
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I guess he's planning to start by wet-leasing from Commutair.

The airport fills up - Long Beach Press Telegram
The last of Long Beach's flight slots are sought by an eager entrepreneur.
For months, the grinding arguments against expansion of Long Beach Airport had a continuing theme: Build it and they will come (meaning that too much expansion will attract too many flights). Now that theme has done an aerobatic flip: Don't build it and they'll come anyway.
Alex Wilcox, an entrepreneur with some of the best background in the business, has put in a bid for all 22 of the airport's remaining slots. If he gets them, the airport will be at capacity, long before its physical facilities are made adequate to the task.
Wilcox proposes that his new company, Smooth Flight Holdings, Inc., contract with CommutAir of New York to provide short-haul flights for major airlines. CommutAir, which also does business as Champlain Enterprises Inc., operates about 200 daily flights with 500,000 passengers as a partner of Continental Airlines. According to the agreement with Wilcox, it would provide at least three Beechcraft 1900Ds for service in Long Beach.
It's not a done deal yet, though. Long Beach Airport officials have asked Wilcox for more information, and presumably will also take a hard look at his business plan.
Meantime, the airport has sent notice throughout the industry about the request for conditional allocation of the slots. If his application were to prove flawed, or if another airline were to apply immediately for a final allocation, he still could be edged out.
If the 19-passenger Beech 1900Ds do start flying out of Long Beach, what will the impact be? For the most part, mild. This little turboprop is much quieter than any of the jets, it lifts off quickly, and by the time it got to the end of Long Beach's 10,000-foot main runway it would be high enough to be barely noticeable. Even at capacity, 22 of those flights, especially if spaced out a bit, wouldn't add all that much to issues of baggage handling, terminal space or auto traffic. The hardest problem to solve might be finding counter space for the ticket agents.
Is it a surprise that all 22 slots got snapped up after lying around unwanted for years? Not really. The 41 commercial (long haul) and three commuter flights already operating out of Long Beach are at 87 percent capacity. That kind of news gets around in the troubled airline industry.
Assuming Wilcox's financial backing is strong, he is well prepped for his new venture. He is a former executive of JetBlue, the phenomenally successful airline that holds most of Long Beach's commercial slots, and until recently ran Kingfisher Airlines in Bangalore, India.
His arrival wouldn't end the dispute about the airport, however. Opponents of expansion (or rather overexpansion) will continue to worry that any appearance of excess capacity might tempt a hungry airline (they're all hungry) to try to crack the noise ordinance with a legal attack.
Nothing will ever make those worries go away entirely, although the city's determination to protect its noise ordinance is a far better way to resist a proliferation of flights than keeping a 64-year-old airport terminal in a state of cramped inadequacy.
Even before the old airport is improved, Wilcox's little planes are a welcome asset.