EDITORIAL: You are now free to fly to LaGuardia Airport
LUV | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Sacramentans are about to benefit from the troubles of an old friend.
Southwest Airlines, which has been, essentially, the capital's hometown airline for a generation, found success offering no-frills, low-cost regional service.
The airline offered no meals or snacks and forced customers to line up in a first-come, first-served cattle call for the best seats.
But its routes filled a niche left by the merger of the old PSA with USAir, which then slowly abandoned California. Southwest built a huge fan base here by offering several trips daily between Sacramento and Southern California, Phoenix and elsewhere in the West.
If you wanted to fly farther than that on Southwest, you usually had to put up with multiple stops and out-of-the-way, secondary airports. We did that once in a while but usually shifted to the bigger airlines for cross-country travel.
Now, with its passenger load shrinking and profits pinched, Southwest is branching out. Today, the airline begins service from Sacramento to New York's LaGuardia airport, via Chicago.
The new route will give Sacramentans two easy ways to reach the Big Apple, since JetBlue recently restarted its nightly nonstop red-eye flights into Kennedy Airport. No more flying into Long Island or Newark.
We're sorry Southwest has fallen on hard times. But we're glad that the airline has reacted by expanding its service in search of new customers.
That's the way capitalism is supposed to work. We hope it does this time.
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