KC Flights Canceled, XNA Road now at $45M

There is no longer commercial air service from the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Highfill to either Kansas City or Little Rock, two of the area’s closest cities.

U.S. Airways Express, which cut its three daily round-trip flights to Little Rock in November, axed its three daily Kansas City flights in March. No other airline has flights to those cities from the regional airport, which is known as XNA.

Scott Van Laningham, executive director of XNA, said part of the reason was a two-hour advanced arrival time required nationwide after the September 11 terrorism.

Motorists can drive to Little Rock in about two and a half hours and to Kansas City in about four hours.

“When they were doing two-hour check-in, by the time you drove to the airport, checked in and flew to Kansas City, you could have driven there and been conducting business already,” Van Laningham said.

The federal government shortened the check-in arrival time in March to 90 minutes for passengers checking bags and one hour for passengers with only carry-on luggage.

But, Van Laningham said, with the Little Rock flights already canceled, U.S. Airways Express probably wanted to cancel the Kansas City flights because those were originally part of a Little Rock-XNA-Kansas City round-trip route.

“My guess is when they dropped the Little Rock part of that, that it was not a good utilization of [aircraft] to just go to XNA, so they just dropped the flight,” Van Laningham said. “They didn’t have a lot of passengers, and that’s the deciding factor.”

U.S. Airways Express continues to operate a route from XNA to its hub in Charlotte, N.C.

Van Laningham said XNA now has 38 round-trip flights daily. That’s down from 46 before September 11. Besides Charlotte, the airport has flights to Dallas, Chicago, New York City, St. Louis, Atlanta and Memphis.

The airport also is served by Northwest Airlink (a regional carrier for Northwest Airlines), American Connections, Atlantic Southeast Airlines (a regional carrier for Delta Air Lines), American Airlines and American Eagle (a regional carrier for American Airlines).

Van Laningham said the newly created federal Transportation Security Administration is in the process of taking over security operations at airports nationwide.

Administrators at XNA aren’t sure at this point what changes that will mean for the airport in Highfill, but security employees will be federal employees eight months from now rather than contract labor.

“There will be some additional security equipment that will be used,” Van Laningham added.

The eight-mile access road that will connect the airport directly to Interstate 540 will cost more than initially expected, primarily because of the construction of two long bridges, over Osage Creek and Little Osage Creek.

Van Laningham said the project will now cost $45 million to $47 million. That’s an increase of about $8 million from initial projections. The completion date also has been pushed back from 2005 to 2006.