Blue Monday at John Wayne : Customers Bid Adieu to Airspur Employees
Yesterday was Blue Monday at John Wayne Airport for the employees of Evergreen Airspur. Regular customers stopped by the ticket counter to offer condolences to customer service agents on the airline’s last scheduled day of operation.
“If one more person says ‘Sorry to see you go,’ I’m going to burst into tears,” a customer service agent said Monday morning at Evergreen Airspur’s ticket counter at John Wayne Airport.
Plagued by a shortage of paying passengers, the financially troubled air-taxi service was scheduled to shut down operations Monday evening, halting its flights between Orange County and Los Angeles International Airport.
Gary O’Connor, Evergreen Airspur president, said that Evergreen International Aviation, Airspur’s Oregon-based corporate parent, intends to pay all the airline’s legitimate debts.
“This is not a bankruptcy. It is a shutdown,” he said, although he gave no indication of plans to revive the airline.
O’Connor said he was making an effort to find jobs elsewhere within the Evergreen organization for “as many as possible” of Airspur’s 40 employees, several of whom said they were taken by surprise when they were notified Friday night of the airline’s closing.
Airspur had been offering 11 round-trip flights daily, except Saturday, between John Wayne and LAX. The airline’s only other route consisted of nine daily round-trip flights between LAX and Oxnard.
O’Connor said Airspur ticket counters will remain open through Wednesday to reroute passengers who have reserved seats or purchased tickets for subsequently canceled flights.
Airspur tickets will be honored by Imperial Airlines, which flies between John Wayne and LAX, and by Wings West on its Oxnard-to-Los Angeles runs.
Imperial Airlines probably will add three or four more daily flights to its current 11-flight schedule at John Wayne to pick up passengers who otherwise would have flown on Airspur, according to James Harmon, chief executive officer and president of Imperial Airlines Inc.
‘Good Decision’
Airspur’s competitors contend there never was a large enough market for flights between LAX and Orange County or between LAX and Oxnard to justify service by more than one airline at each satellite airport.
“They made a good business decision to pull out,” said Mark Morro, president and chief executive of Wings West, a San Luis Obispo-based airline that has been operating at Oxnard airport since 1982. Morro said he sees no reason for Wings West, which now operates eight round trips daily between Oxnard and Los Angeles, to increase its frequency of flights. He said Airspur’s departure leaves “no void in the market.”
“We were just not receiving the ridership we needed,” acknowledged O’Connor of Airspur. “Our passenger loads were falling 10% to 15% below break even.” Systemwide, he said, the airline’s two, 17-seat turboprop airplanes were carrying about 4,000 passengers a month. He would not disclose the size of the airline’s loss.
Airspur, a Los Angeles-based airline that was founded in February, 1983, has faced a series of troubles. Its license was suspended for nine weeks after one of its helicopters crashed November, 1983, in Long Beach, injuring six people aboard. Federal Aviation Administration investigators later discovered that the tail rotor on the Westland 30 was defective. The British helicopter manufacturer subsequently corrected the problem. However, after the disruption in service, it took the carrier six months and a blitz of advertising to rebuild its passenger base.
Last May, Airspur was warned by the Civil Aeronautics Board that it must cease operations unless it transfered the bulk of its debt from a British bank to a U.S. institution. Federal law requires that domestic airlines be controlled by U.S. citizens.
In November, Airspur’s foreign financing problem was solved when the airline was sold to privately held Evergreen International Aviation of McMinnville, Ore, for undisclosed terms. Evergreen operates about 140 helicopters used in support of offshore drilling and exploration in various parts of the world. The company also operates a fleet of cargo jets and owns a large aircraft and helicopter maintenance and repair facility near Tucson.
A month after the merger, Airspur’s Burbank-to-Los Angeles service was eliminated and replaced with service at Oxnard. The new management removed helicopters on Airspur’s inter-airport shuttle routes, replacing them with fixed-wing aircraft that were less costly to operate.
But O’Connor said the airline until recently had been working on plans to initiate a helicopter service between LAX and helipads in outlying communities and downtown Los Angeles.
Evergreen does not disclose financial information about its subsidiaries. The parent corporation’s earnings are not available, but O’Connor said the company had revenues last year of about $200 million and is financially strong.
