Gallup air service in holding pattern

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Attention all passengers waiting to board a Westward Airways flight to Phoenix or Las Cruces, your flights have been delayed.

Back in October, the Nebraska-based airline expected to have daily commercial flights up and running through Gallup by the end of January.

Now, said Assistant City Manager Larry Binkley, "we're looking at the plane being down here toward the end of February."

The reason for the delay: lost mail.

In order to subsidize the flights, which won't be able to pay their own way for at least the next few years, Gallup put up $200,000 of the city's own money to qualify for a 1-to-1 matching grant from the New Mexico Air Service Assistance Program, which is run by the Aviation Division of the state's Highway and Transportation Department.

Problem is, said Binkley, "the state grant didn't come through as it was supposed to."

The reason the grant didn't come through, according to Aviation Division engineer Joe Shain, was because it got lost in the mail.

Shain said the Division mailed the agreement to Gallup for city officials to sign Jan. 6. With no sign of the package or much hope that it would arrive, he said, Gallup City Attorney George Kozeliski traveled to Santa Fe Wednesday to sign the grant agreement in person. Once Shain's boss adds his signature to the agreement Monday, Shain added, the grant will be a "done deal" at last.

It will still take some time for the plane a to actually make it to Gallup, however.

Because the grant helping to pay for the plane is arriving late, said Binkley, documents must be redrawn. That could take more than a week. Once the plane arrives, he said it will take another tree weeks for Westward to retrofit it. All that pushes the plane's Gallup debut back to late February.

The Independent called Westward President Kristi Feusner Friday morning to confirm the delay and ask for details. After avoiding the question, Feusner said she'd call back later in the day but never did.

Though Westward is pushing back its Gallup debut, said Binkley, the company is sticking to its original plans for fares and routes.

Those plans involve linking Gallup into a triangle of daily flights with Las Cruces and Phoenix, with an emphasis on the Arizona capital. Both Las Cruces and Gallup will see two round-trip flights to Phoenix each day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. Gallup gets only one round-trip flight on Saturdays, however. There will also be morning flights from Las Cruces to Gallup and a return trip in the evening.

Tickets for Gallup flights to Phoenix will run up to $148 one way. The same route costs only $108, however, if booked at least 21 days in advance. The cheapest flight in the circuit between Gallup and Las Cruces, booked 21 days in advance will run $48.

With those prices, Westward isn't paying for the operation with ticket sales alone. To pull it off, Gallup joined two other cities Las Cruces and Taos in a consortium to bring Westward to New Mexico. Each city chipped in $200,000 in order to qualify for a matching $600,000 grant from Aviation Division. An additional $1.4 million is also on its way courtesy of the federal government's Small Community Air Service Development Pilot Program.

Once it's all worked out, passengers will be boarding the Pilatus PC-12, a nine-seat, single turbo-propeller engine plane of Swiss make.

A second PC-12, also part of the agreement, has been serving New Mexico's Rio Grande corridor since late November, linking Taos and Las Cruces through Albuquerque.