Peak season for ORH (Worcester Regional Airport) is the winter time starting in December.  If JetBlue, or anyone else, wanted to start a new route out of ORH, they would not want to miss peak season.    Considering it takes at least 60 days to get a new flight up and running with tickets, etc, we would need an announcement by October 1st.  

Another way to look at this though is that nobody will add anything until CAT III is up and running.    The latest thing we have heard was that April of 2017 may be when we see CAT III operational at ORH.    Either way we see additional flights being announced over the next 6 months.   What airlines and routes may we expect:

 

  1. JetBlue to Fort Myers and San Juan.   Although we would love to see a NYC flight, we just do not see this happening just yet.  At the same time we have hearing that as many 25 people are connecting out of ORH to San Juan on some flights.  
  2. Allegiant to Myrtle and St Pete’s:   Since Allegiant left the ownership of the airport, the airport director and FBO (Fixed Base Operator) have al changed.   All of which were huge improvements.    In addition there has close to $40 million dollars (number may be higher) invested in CAT III and other infrastructure projects.   We see no reason why they would seriously consider coming back and they would be the perfect compliment to existing JetBlue service.

 

The other day we posted a column asking if Rectix was moving their fleet to ORH?   We received this comment on the website from Richard Cawley, CEO of Rectrix

1 COMMENT
[email protected]’
RICH CAWLEY
August 25, 2016 at 8:13 am (Edit) — Reply
GE Corp moved to BOS and they of course use our BED FBO for some of their fleet. We are moving our fleet to ORH as this has always been our plan from day one once we achieved scale enough to do so.

3.  Rectrix initiating commercial service to NYC or Cape Cod and the islands.   Better yet maybe they would look into Sarasota, were they have operations with a stop along the way?  Also maybe the plan was to always move the Rectrix fleet to ORH, but we did not know that, sorry.   Rectrix has been a great addition to ORH!!!

 

We are also hearing some other rumors so stay tuned.   None of this ever would have happened if we, the City of Worcester, had remained the owner and should maybe help our City Council getting out of other non-essesntial businesses:

 

  1. Subsidizing the cost of affordable housing
  2. Golf courses
  3. Convention Centers
  4. Train Stations
  5. Parking Garages