Allegiant, Horizon Explore Suburban Seattle Service

As Brett Snyder noted recently, Allegiant Air is looking to expand, and according to local reports, one of the next routes it’s likely to add is service between Las Vegas and Everett, Wash., some 30 miles north of Seattle.

Allegiant and Alaska Air Group subsidiary Horizon Air are working with Snohomish County officials to redevelop the existing terminal at Paine Field so it can house their operations. For its part, Horizon is committed to launching daily service using 72-seat Bombardier Q400 turboprops from Paine Field to Spokane, Wash., and Portland, Ore., perhaps as soon as April. Allegiant has also formally expressed interest in flying from the airport, calling it “an excellent candidate for service,” but is reportedly not as far along in its planning.

Allegiant already flies from Bellingham, Wash., which is about 90 miles north of Seattle, near the Canadian border. It serves Reno and Las Vegas, Phoenix and five destinations in California from there.

A series of studies over the years, including some I wrote about back in the day, have found that there already are enough airline customers to support daily service from the air field, which was built in the ’30s as part of the same New Deal economic stimulus package that paid for building New York’s LaGuardia airport. And anecdotal evidence hints many would-be fliers from Seattle’s northern suburbs are driving to Portland instead of flying because of the hassle of getting to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, south of Seattle.

But there’s always been fierce opposition to scheduled air service, primarily from the residents of Mukilteo, an affluent waterfront city next door to the airport. Residents there fear that the added noise and traffic of a commercial airport will hurt property values, and the mayor is threatening to sue to block the new service.

However, Snohomish County officials say that if airlines want to come to Paine Field there’s little they can do to stop them, due to federal deed restrictions. Some also fear that if they fight airline service, Paine will lose out on $73 million in federal economic stimulus money that is needed for improvements to the parts of the airport used by Boeing, which runs flight tests on jets built at its nearby Everett factory, and by Aviation Technical Services, a Macquarrie Bank subsidiary that runs a major airliner-maintenance facility.