JetBlue Airlines announced some revisions for its West Coast strategy Wednesday morning which includes some significant cuts in service at Long Beach Airport.
In a press release, the airline said that it would be cutting daily service to and from LGB to 23 daily flights out of the 35 permanent and supplemental flight slots the airline holds at Long Beach.
“Revising our schedule allows us to offer customers new destinations, capitalize on our leadership position in transcontinental flying and advance our margin commitments in Long Beach where certain flying constraints have created challenges,” said Marty St. George, executive vice president of commercial and planning for JetBlue.
Among the changes announced were adding service to surrounding airports like Ontario, an city that JetBlue had dropped in 2008, and increasing service at Burbank Airport. The revised schedule at Long Beach includes two new routes to Montana and seasonal service to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where travelers flock to for its internationally known ski resorts. The two new routes will begin in December.
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JetBlue will offer three daily flights to Las Vegas, twice-daily flights to Oakland, San Francisco, Boston and San Jose, and offer one daily flight to Portland and Seattle. The frequency in service between New York-JFK, Fort Lauderdale, Austin and Reno will remain unchanged, according to the release. The changes will be effective starting September 5.
JetBlue and the city have been at odds since the airline requested to build an international terminal at LGB in early 2015. The city council ultimately denied the airline’s request, instead voting to receive and file the issue in January 2017, a move that left Robert Land, senior vice president of government affairs and associate general counsel for the airline, feeling “profoundly disappointed”. Land said then that the airline would evaluate its future plans for Long Beach and the rest of the region.
In a statement made to another local media outlet, St. George said the changes were linked to the council’s decision in January 2017 to table the international terminal.
The city has since announced the arrival of Southwest Airlines as a provider of service at LGB and has awarded multiple flight slots to competitors, including Southwest, after annual noise analyses have shown the airport could offer additional flight slots without exceeding its annual noise budget.
In a statement put out after JetBlue’s announcement the city said any unused slots at LGB would unlikely sit vacant for long.
“Long Beach Airport has an established waiting list of airlines who have very high levels of interest in any available slots,” a statement released by the city said. “These airlines currently include Delta, Southwest and Hawaiian. As additional slots become available, they are offered, in order, to carriers on the established list. For the reason that there is strong demand, slots will be filled quickly.”
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As the airport’s largest tenant, JetBlue has also been the focus of community anger over late-night flight noise, for which it was also the main culprit. Because of its frequency in violating the airport’s noise curfew the airline has been entered into a consent decree with the city prosecutor’s office that sees it pay a fine rather than be tried for violating the curfew.
In January, the city announced it would begin taking steps to potentially amend the noise ordinance by increasing the base fines from hundreds of dollars to fines that could approach $10,000 per violation for frequent offenders like JetBlue. The airline had been paying up to $3,000 per violation, an amount that was increased to $6,000 per violation in an update to the consent decree in August.
“The decision by JetBlue was not unexpected, and we respect decisions airlines make to ensure they are best positioned in a market, especially one that is competitive,” Long Beach Airport Director Jess L. Romo said in a statement released by the city. “We see this as an opportunity to create a better balance among the air carriers serving Long Beach Airport and one that will maintain our existing service, and in fact will likely lead to new markets in the very near future.”