McCarran sixth in U.S. in domestic passenger count

Monday, March 14, 2005 | 10:47 a.m.

McCarran International Airport has moved up a notch to sixth place for domestic enplanements among the nation's airports.

And McCarran's largest commercial passenger carrier, Southwest Airlines, has taken over as the top domestic carrier in the United States, according to statistics released last week by the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

McCarran climbed from seventh to sixth place with 19.6 million enplanements in 2004, up from 17.3 million a year earlier.

McCarran trails No. 1 Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, Chicago O'Hare International, Dallas-Fort Worth International, Los Angeles International and Denver International.

The top four airports maintained their positions, but Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport, No. 5 in 2003, slid to No. 7 while Denver and Las Vegas moved up.

Rounding out the top 10 are No. 8 Minneapolis-St. Paul International, Detroit Metro-Wayne County and Orlando International airports.

"We grew faster than everybody else," Randy Walker, director of the Clark County Department of Aviation, said of the move in the ranking. "They just didn't grow as fast as we did."

Walker attributed the growth to increased demand for Las Vegas.

"People want to come here," Walker said. "The hotels are full and the airlines pick up on that demand and add flights."

Walker said McCarran has the potential to grow even more next month when 10 new D gates open. The airport actually is netting only four additional gates, since six in the A and B concourse were lost when the airport expanded a baggage security area.

When the new D gates open, Continental, Alaska and JetBlue airlines will move from the A gates to the D side.

Among airlines, the top 10 domestic carriers had a few changes from 2003 statistics, including Dallas-based Southwest wresting the No. 1 position away from Delta Air Lines.

Southwest had 81.1 million domestic enplanements in 2004, compared with 79.4 million for Delta.

McCarran's No. 2 carrier, America West Airlines, maintained its No. 8 ranking nationwide. All but one of the nation's top domestic carriers -- commuter American Eagle Airlines -- have flights to and from Las Vegas.

Following Southwest and Delta, the top 10 domestic carriers are American, United, Northwest, US Airways, Continental, America West, American Eagle and Alaska.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics said most measures of air transportation were up over 2003 levels.

The report said revenue passenger miles, a measure of the number of passengers and the distance flown, were up 9.9 percent over 2003 levels and available seat miles, a measure of airline capacity, was up 7.3 percent.

Load factors for the nation's airlines were up 1.8 points to 74.5 percent.

The number of passengers carried was up 7.2 percent to 629.7 million and the number of flights was up 3.3 percent to 9.9 million.

In Las Vegas, the average number of daily flights grew 11.8 percent to 497 a day from 2003 to 2004 while capacity grew 10.5 percent to 72,607 seats coming into the market every day.