I’ve been playing around with the January T100 data from the DOT, and a press release I saw last week made me focus in on Wichita. Why Wichita? Because when an airport puts out a press release entitled, “Wichita Mid-Continent Airport Continues to Set Passenger Records!,” I have to comment. (And yes, the exclamation point was actually included.)

In the release, the airport likes to brag . . . a lot. It’s a great airport, great city, blah blah blah. They brag about new nonstops to Orlando/Sanford on Allegiant, LAX on both Delta Connection and United Express, and Frontier (actually Lynx) to Denver. But how are those flights doing? Not so well.

If you dig into the actual data from the DOT, you’ll see for January, the Allegiant flight filled just 57.3 percent of seats, the Frontier flight 45.7 percent, and the United Express flight edged out Delta Connection by filling 42.2 percent of seats compared to 36.9 percent for the latter.

Now this doesn’t tell us what kind of fares these flights are getting, but I think it’s safe to say that they’re not high enough to make 36 to 57 percent full flights profitable. Those are absolutely dismal seat figures, and no amount of PR spin can hide that fact.