increase our passengers served, and we’re on track to exceed 900,000 passengers in calendar year 2024. That’s largely due, not only to the uptick in the demand for travel, but also to the additional opportunities that our airline partners have come on board to provide.” Roach outlines some of those travel opportunities: “In May, United added a 5th daily flight to Denver; that will be on a seasonable basis. It’s the most that United ever served Denver on a daily basis; typically they dropped to three a week during the winter season (ramped up at the holidays), but in the past, we’ve seen four a day during the summer. This year we have five a day during the summer.” “Allegiant added a new service to LAX (Los Angeles International). That’s a seasonal – twice a week, which we began on May 16th.Alaska Airlines brought back their Portland service – not on a seasonable basis. Now it’s on a daily, year-round basis. That also started on May 16th. And we’re happy to announce that we have a new carrier that started with us this summer season and that is Sun Country with a Billings/Minneapolis-St. Paul route twice a week, which began on June 19th and will run through the end of August. That’s brought our available seats from about 1.2 million seats a year ago to 1.6 million available seats out of our market this year.” Roach notes that the airport also continues to be the busiest freight airport in Montana, “In 2023, we served over 77 million pounds of air freight through Billings that is distributed throughout the multistate region that we serve.” “In 2022, we were the 63rd busiest air freight operation airport in the nation. We are looking forward to seeing what the calendar year 2023 numbers are going to be. Those should come out sometime in August. We’re hoping that we’ll continue to rise up in the ranking in air freight operations.” BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT “We do have land available and aeronautical and non-aeronautical lease areas available -- some with developed utilities and some that are currently undeveloped,” says Roach. “And to that end, we are 19 AVIATION VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 04, ISSUE 03 BILLINGS LOGAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
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