Spirit Airlines officially opened its Las Vegas crew base Tuesday, formally starting the process of making 200 of the company’s pilots, flight attendants and mechanics local residents.
About 100 Spirit employees, most of them flight attendants hired locally, are already part of the base. The Miramar, Fla.-based airline is expanding its fleet of Airbus twin-engine jets and is in the midst of a national recruitment of pilots. About 65 percent of Las Vegas base employees will be flight attendants, while 35 percent will be pilots and mechanics when the base is fully staffed by May 1.
The airline is taking delivery of seven new jets this year, including one it received last week. Spirit flies three versions of the Airbus 320 family of jets, including 145-passenger A319s, 178-passenger A320s and 216-passenger A321s.
Spirit Chief Operating Officer Tony Lefebvre was in Las Vegas Tuesday to give details about the new base and to publicize the Wednesday startup of the airline’s new nonstop flights between Las Vegas and Mesa Gateway Airport in Mesa, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb.
Spirit will have line maintenance workers to do aircraft inspections, small repairs and change tires, but not major overhauls and repairs.
It will be McCarran International Airport’s second airline crew base. Southwest Airlines opened a crew base in Las Vegas in 2007. US Airways had a base in Las Vegas as America West Airlines but closed it when the newly merged company reduced its presence in the city in 2010.
For Spirit, the crew base is the company’s fourth and the second largest behind its operation in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The company also has bases in Detroit and Atlantic City.
Spirit was McCarran’s fastest growing commercial air carrier in 2011, adding flights to Los Angeles International, San Diego and Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; and Dallas-Fort Worth International after only having routes to Detroit and Chicago’s O’Hare International for years.
The airline carried 1.1 million passengers to and from Las Vegas in 2011 for a 228 percent increase in growth over 2010.
When Spirit adds its two round trips a day between Las Vegas and Mesa Gateway and its previously announced seasonal service to Fort Lauderdale on March 1, the airline will have 21 daily Las Vegas flights.
Lefebvre said the airline didn’t have any new service announcements for Las Vegas, but that the public “can read the tea leaves” about Spirit’s expansion and pattern of growth.
Cathy Tull, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s senior vice president of marketing, said the two new daily Mesa flights alone would produce a $97 million nongaming economic impact on Southern Nevada for the rest of 2012 and could be a key factor in pushing toward an unprecedented 40 million visitors to the city this year.
Spirit has made national headlines recently as one of the most outspoken air carriers critical of the U.S. Transportation Department’s new consumer protection rules that require airlines to post fares inclusive of all taxes and fees paid by all passengers.
The company showed its displeasure by imposing a new $2-per-flight “unintended consequences fee” that it says would pay for the cost of the airline having to hold reservations for 24 hours after booking without penalty, another of the rules the Department of Transportation imposed.