Internal emails: Allegiant suggests restarting service at NoCo Regional next spring

LOVELAND — Days before it cancelled its planned routes to and from Northern Colorado Regional Airport, representatives from Allegiant Air Travel Co. (Nasdaq: ALGT) told the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and the airport that it could re-announce its flight service to and from the airport as soon as January.

The Las Vegas airline said it would move its schedules to January once federal authorities established the virtual air traffic control test project at the site, according to emails recapping an Oct. 17 telephone conference that included multiple officials from the airline, several FAA staffers, airport director Jason Licon and a representative from a third-party air traffic controller.

About a week after that call, Allegiant enterprise project manager Leah Scherr emailed airport and federal aviation officials to set up a meeting to freeze the flight start process and possibly use that toward restarting service in 2020.

“Planning guidance from Network Planning is best case (ATC tower ready), we’d consider (re-)announcing in January for possibly Spring service,” Scherr wrote.

BizWest obtained the emails from airport officials under the Colorado Open Records Act.

Those discussions took place a few days before and after Allegiant made its announcement to scrap the planned routes from the airport to Las Vegas and Mesa, Arizona. At the time, the company said it was promised on-site air traffic control, but the airport couldn’t receive FAA certification before the start date of Nov. 21.

At that time, Licon told BizWest that Serco Group PLC (LSP: SRP), a British public services company that provides third-party air traffic control to airports in the western U.S., pulled out of contract negotiations in the late stages and left the airport with not enough time to find another provider.

In a phone interview Thursday, Licon said Allegiant’s purported change in timeline is why the airport tried to frame the October cancellation as a delay rather than a scrapping of all the flight plans.

Despite failing to find enough air traffic controllers in time for Allegiant’s planned start date, Serco is still the FAA’s choice to provide controllers for the virtual tower test in January.

Licon said both the airport and Allegiant are skeptical of the agency’s promise based on previous events, and described it as a “wait-and-see” instead of something the airport and airline can plan for. However, he thinks the FAA has a more solid plan as it tries to hit its January deadline.

“That’s really the challenge that we have with getting the system operational, that the FAA is working on systems and functionality that’s highly pioneering and we’re excited to be the testbed of that,” he said. “However, the timelines are a kind of a guess; they’re working with a lot of unknowns.”

When reached by email Thursday, an Allegiant spokeswoman said the emails were speculative, and any discussions about restarting service at the airport are contingent on having air traffic controllers for the site.

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