Vegas loses four flights with grounding of Sun Country

Monday, Dec. 10, 2001 | 10:48 a.m.

If defunct Sun Country Airlines regroups as an air charter carrier, Las Vegas probably would be one of the first cities the company would come back to.

"Las Vegas has always been one of our most popular destinations," Tammy Lee, a spokeswoman for the company, said Sunday. "We had regular charter service there before we began scheduled flights."

But for now, the Mendota Heights, Minn.-based discount carrier has grounded its fleet and canceled all scheduled service, including the four flights that ran nearly every day to and from McCarran International Airport. All but six of the company's 900 employees -- including 30 in Las Vegas -- were laid off Friday at midnight.

The six remaining employees are the ones the airline needs to maintain its Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration certifications.

Sun Country announced Thursday that its last flights would go out Friday. In Las Vegas, that meant morning departures to Dallas, Milwaukee and Minneapolis. The airline said customers with tickets for future flights should contact Sun Country for a refund or to make arrangements to fly on another carrier.

This week, the company is meeting with potential buyers in an effort to rebuild the airline into a fly-for-hire charter operation. That was Sun Country's strategy when the airline opened in 1982, but it turned itself into a scheduled airline in June 1999.

The William La Macchia family, which owns several travel companies including Mark Travel Corp., TransGlobal Vacations and Funjet Vacations, developed Sun Country to fly sports and military charters and other groups from cold-weather locations in the Midwest to Mexico, the Caribbean and Las Vegas. When scheduled service began, the airline was spun off into a separate company.

Now, the La Macchia travel companies will coordinate the transition back to charter service while a search continues for a buyer.

Lee said about 40 employees are expected to be hired back right away this week to plot the strategy for charters. Whether any Las Vegas employees would be asked back will depend on specifics of that strategy. Lee said the company could hire some of the Las Vegas work force back, or it could contract ground operations to another company.

She said if Sun Country does run charters to Las Vegas, they would most likely be to and from Minneapolis only.

That would reduce some capacity into McCarran.

Through October, Sun Country carried 408,327 passengers to Las Vegas in 2001. It had six flights a week between Las Vegas and Detroit, Milwaukee and Dallas-Fort Worth and daily plus twice-a-week service between Las Vegas and Minneapolis.

Those flights represented 0.9 percent of all scheduled service into Las Vegas and 656 average daily incoming seats, 1.08 percent of all seats airlines flew into the city. That made Sun Country and 12th largest of 29 airlines that still serve McCarran.

In the last year, Sun Country replaced some of its aging jumbo jets and Boeing 727s with more fuel-efficient Boeing 737s. The net result was that there was one less flight a week to Las Vegas from a year ago, but capacity was reduced from 1,066 average daily seats coming in to 656.

The Las Vegas market that will be most affected by Sun Country's departure is Milwaukee. There's only one other competitor offering direct non-stop flights between Las Vegas and Milwaukee, Midwest Express, which has a daily and four weekly flights to and from McCarran.

Analysts say fares may rise in that market -- and in two others where the primary competition for Sun Country is its biggest rival, Minneapolis-based Northwest Airlines.

In both Minneapolis and Detroit -- both Northwest Airlines hub cities -- Northwest offers five daily flights to and from Las Vegas, and Tempe, Ariz.-based America West Airlines has one to and from each city each day.

Several competitors challenged Sun Country on routes to Dallas-Fort Worth, including Las Vegas-based discounter National Airlines. The dominant player in that route is American Airlines, which has seven daily flights, plus one a week, to and from Las Vegas.

Other competitors are National (an average of just over two flights a day), Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines (two flights a day), America West (one a day) and SkyWest Airlines (one flight a week).

Lee did not identify with whom Sun Country would meet this week. He said a group led by George Wozniak of Hobbit Travel, a Minneapolis travel agency, is still in the picture.

Lee also confirmed that Sun Country has not had any formal discussions with National Airlines, which is in the process of getting its plan of reorganization approved by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Las Vegas. National said in court documents it has filed that it is interested in augmenting its fleet with new, smaller aircraft.

While some of Sun Country's planes are smaller than those in National's fleet, those also would be the ones Sun Country would operate as charters.

Lee said it's possible Sun Country would file for bankruptcy protection if a new buyer or investors don't come forward with an infusion of cash.