Great Lakes Airlines takes off in Gallup

Barb Serfoss, a regional trainer with Great Lakes Airlines, directs one of the company's airplanes toward the runway as it prepares to take off from the Gallup airport on Monday. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — The three screening agents the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration has stationed at the Gallup Municipal Airport haven't had much to do this past week.

They have been stationed at the airport since Great Lakes Airlines brought commercial air service back to Gallup Sunday. As of Thursday afternoon, it's had only eight passengers fly in or out. But if things go according to plan, those TSA screeners should soon have their hands full. If Great Lakes plans to stick around, they'd better.

An hour before Friday's 2 p.m. flight to Phoenix, the screeners were ready for business. A sign by the boarding gate warned would-be passengers that the country, courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security, was on orange alert. Another sign advised them how to pack any carry-on liquids. But with nary a passenger in sight, and no pre-bookings for the flight, the screeners had little to do but watch Kevin Costner and Aston Kutcher ham it up on a television set mounted to the waiting room wall in "The Guardian."

"It's a little slow," Monica Taylor, Great Lakes' director of sales and marketing, said, "but operationally, everything's going well."

The slow takeoff is to be expected, Taylor said. It takes time for any airline to establish itself in a new market, and the fact that Gallup has been without commercial air service for two years only makes it harder. Taylor believes people simply need to start getting used to the idea that it's back.

"I think people want other people to try it first," she said, as if the Beechcraft 1900 landing at the airport every day might be an apparition that could vanish on contact.

But the plane is very real, and city officials believe the airline is doing everything it can to let people know about it.

Great Lakes has been advertising in local newspapers and on local radio stations for weeks. Gallup Joint Utilities mailed out flyers with its last billing. The last week of June, Taylor even visited Gallup to personally encourage local businesses to take advantage of the service.

"They've done everything they can do," said City Attorney George Kozeliski, who doubles as Gallup's airport manager. "Now we just either need to use it or lose it."

City and airline officials are hoping recent history doesn't repeat itself.

Passenger numbers were modest when Westward Airways pulled out of Gallup in July 2005, hardly three weeks after starting service. In 2002, Mesa Airlines pulled out after it abandoned Phoenix flights for Albuquerque and watched ticket sales plummet.

The city is counting on the Phoenix flights to be popular again. And compared to the little advertising Westward did before starting service here, Kozeliski said, Great Lakes is "well ahead of the ball game."

That's not to say the airline has no more work to do. To get by on the $891,000 government subsidy Gallup used to lure Great Lakes here 20 percent of it out of the city's own coffers Taylor said the carrier will have to board 3,250 passengers at the airport a year. That's more than 62 passengers a week. And if it's to survive without the subsidies, she added, "we would probably have to double that."

Eight passengers a week just won't do.

City Hall has touted commercial air service mostly as a business opportunity, a valuable chance for local entrepreneurs to find new markets in Phoenix and for Phoenix to find a market in Gallup.

But if Great Lakes is to meet its targets, Becky Apel, director of the Gallup-McKinley County Chamber of Commerce, believes the city needs to market it not just for business, but for pleasure.

"We're going to have to target not just business, but families as well," she said.

The $891,000 deal the City Council approved last October a combination of city, state and federal funds should carry Great Lakes through to July of 2008. In return, it's obligated to provide two round-trip flights to Phoenix on weekdays and one on weekends. It also threw in a weekday flight to and from Denver.

One-way tickets to Phoenix start at $89.