Live in Vegas and am just sick of commuting for the last four years... Any news would be great, last update on APC was in DEC.

 

I used to work there. Left in Sept 07. Kinda wish I was still there. Some think it is a bad airline cause it does not fit the normal mold. Most of the employees have a good and positive attitude unlike a lot of places I have seen.

As for hiring I talked to someone still there and they said all new hires are heading out east. Vegas has stood still for movement as of late. It may take a few months to get back there. Those that live in Vegas love it! When i left the only overnights were Bellingham and Peoria, IL.

I think they are still getting a few airplanes but not 100% on that. Financially they are actually doing OK. Stock prices have dropped a bit, but the route structure and extremely high load factors keep them going with the high fuel prices.

Best of luck to you. As long as you meet the published mins you have a chance.

 

Will Bellingham be a domicile anytime soon? Or can pilots pretty much count on Vegas for basing?

 

Bellingham is already a base.

 

I should've asked if BLI was a pilot domicile. I know a/c are based there. Thanks.

 

Sure do have lots of airplanes in LAS at night.

 

LAS is a unique market...schedules are non-typical. I think Allegient is one of the few smaller carriers which could have a long-term future, due to it's niche.

 

BLI was supposed to open as a pilot base in March. As far as I know it did and is a pilot base.

Allegiant usually does much less flying on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
That is part of what makes it work. Research shows the demand to and from Vegas on those day is much less than all other days. So instead of wasting money flying a half full MD they elect to not fly at all on those days to the less busy destinations. When I left I would guess they flew 6-10 flights out of Vegas on Tuesdays compared to the full shcedule on the rest of the days. (many people think they just went out of bussiness when they fly through there on TUesdays with all the aircraft there.)

 

We don't do many red eyes anymore and we don't do connections, so most LAS based airplanes are home in LAS parked at night; they found that not enough people are interested in red eye flights.
Bellingham is a busy new base/domicile for us. We have flights everyday out of there, sometimes 3 times a day...and they have been pretty full. Lots of Canadians will drive an hour to fly on us because it costs them $100+ more to pay the taxes and fly across the border from Vancouver. It doesn't cost them any taxes to drive across the border to Bellingham, WA.
Most destinations we only service 2 days a week which is perfect for smaller cities which couldn't fill a 150 seat airplane everyday. They're able to do so because of the low initial cost to buy the MD-80s; we don't have to keep them flying all day long to turn a profit like newer Boeings and Airbuses. It also allows us to rotate an airplane to serve different cities on different days of the week so we don't have to dedicate one airplane to any one route.
(ie. just one airplane can serve city A & B on Sat & Wed...city C & D on Sun & Thurs...and city E & F on Mon & Fri). At the end of the day, each LAS based airplane is at it's home base ready to go to another city the next morning.
LAS is currently a pretty senior base. Most new hires were sent to SFB, FLL, UTA, and BLI in the last 2 classes. Hopefully hiring will resume in late summer.
We also recently contracted with The Blue Man Group show at the LAS Venetian hotel. Not sure of all the details, but we sell their tickets onboard and have advertising for them inside our planes. In turn, they have our logo on the airplane featured in their show and somehow we share in the profits; just one more way of "thinking outside of the box" and finding additional streams of revenue.

 

Allegiant, to me, seems to beone of thebest upstarts. They manage growth intelligently, seem to have a good plan/model, and are executing.