‘All hands on deck’ effort aims to return direct flights to Evansville
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIn 2022, Evansville Regional Airport lost service to two important business markets, and efforts continue to return that air service back to the city.
The loss of nonstop flights to Chicago and Detroit is a “huge issue” for the city, according to Evansville Regional Economic Partnership CEO Lloyd Winnecke. The former Evansville mayor says not having such service over a longer period of time could become a growing detriment to the city.
Winnecke talked about the impact on Inside INdiana Business with Gerry Dick.
“The reality is that we have limited corporate headquarters here, and when those headquarter businesses need to get personnel to Chicago to Detroit, or to other cities through those gateway airports, it’s a big hindrance to us,” he said. “So what we think it does, it puts those headquarters at risk of potentially leaving here.”
Winnecke noted that while none of the companies headquartered in Evansville have threatened to leave, cities of similar size have greater challenges in terms of keeping headquarters in their communities.
“So, we need every asset available, and that includes direct air service to Chicago or Detroit,” he said.
The effort to bring nonstop flights to Chicago and Detroit has been very intense, according to Winnecke, with an “all hands on deck” approach from the business community in Evansville, as well as the Indiana Economic Development Corp. and Gov. Eric Holcomb’s office.
“Unfortunately, they can’t produce more pilots, and this is really driven by a pilot shortage,” he said. “But they have facilitated, to their credit, ongoing discussions with all the airlines. The airline’s know that this is not just the greater Evansville region with our hand up saying, ‘Hey, we want service restored.’ They’re hearing from the highest levels of state government that this is really important to business in Indiana.”
Winnecke said officials in Evansville are hopeful that air service being restored Chicago and Detroit could happen this year, but there isn’t any indication that that is a definitive possibility.
Meanwhile, in Indianapolis, new records are being set at Indianapolis International Airport, which saw 9.7 million passengers in 2023, surpassing pre-pandemic numbers.
Indianapolis Airport Authority Executive Director Mario Rodriguez told IIB those numbers came a year earlier than anticipated and reflects “the resilience and the economic strength of the state.”
Rodriguez said the airport had 50 nonstop flights before the pandemic and currently has 49. And efforts continue to bring transatlantic flights to Europe back to the airport.
“We’re concentrating, looking at different airlines, and we’re talking to them, us and the governor’s office,” he said. “It’s very important to reestablish a European connection. Although we were established, most of the other connections are already solid. So that’s the last one to follow, the last domino to fall, we’re focusing in on it with 100% of our effort.”
He noted that the pilot shortage is slowing growth, but work is ongoing to bring new pilots into the fold.
“It takes, in the United States, about 1,500 hours to actually train a pilot. That’s happening right now. But the industry didn’t see this happen,” he said. “What COVID did is it compressed a decade of change into about three years. So, we got to wait until all these crews are retrained [and] the capacity comes up which is going to happen. The capacity will come up, and we’ll have more capacity in the system, and we’ll be able to serve our public even better than we are now.”