Southwest Airlines will start once-a-day flights between RDU Airport and Houston's Hobby Airport on June 3, RDU says.
The flight will depart RDU at 4:20pm, arriving at Houston at 6:05pm. The return flight leaves Houston at 1:20pm and arrives at RDU at 5pm.
Houston will become the 12th destination city for Southwest service from RDU. Teresa Damiano, RDU deputy airport director, said Houston will give RDU travelers an alternative connection to key West Coast cities.
Vision Airlines, a low-cost carrier recently evicted from an Arkansas airport for unpaid bills, will launch twice-weekly nonstop service Friday from Raleigh-Durham International Airport to Grand Bahama Island.
The Monday and Friday evening flights to the Freeport airport will use Boeing 737 jets.
Vision, based in Suwanee, Ga., was forced to halt service from Little Rock National Airport in Arkansas last month in a dispute over more than $50,000 in unpaid fees. John C. Brantley, the RDU airport director, said he has taken steps to minimize RDU’s risk in dealing with Vision Airlines.
“They were in three or four airports where they pulled out fairly quickly,” Brantley said. “Their track record certainly is not the best in the world, so we have gone to the extreme to make sure we were protected from any potential default on their part.”
He said Vision will operate through a contract with Raleigh-based Charter Express, an established tenant at RDU. ... [MORE]
John C. Brantley and Raleigh-Durham International Airport have found it hard to say good-bye to each other, and the RDU board this week persuaded Brantley to stay a few months longer as airport director.
Brantley announced in March that he would retire July 31 from the job he has held since 1982. But board members don’t want to appoint a temporary replacement, and they asked him to stay until they hired a permanent successor.
“He’s flexible, and we certainly want to minimize any gap in leadership,” Terry Yeargan of Willow Spring, the RDU Authority board chairman, said today. “We agreed it would be good if he stayed on through the fall.” ... [MORE]
The Transportation Security Administration plans a software upgrade for its full-body scanner machines at 40 airports including Raleigh-Durham International, to get rid of the explicit video images that have drawn complaints about personal privacy.
The millimeter wave imaging machines now used at RDU and many airports produce a silvery image of the traveler's skin -- with detailed, intimate body outlines. TSA says the image is viewed only by a security officer isolated in a nearby room, but many travelers have objected. Some say they'd rather undergo intimate body pat-downs than submit to the body scanners.
[7/21/11 update: ACLU welcomes the change. See today's story.]
The new software will display a generic, cookie-cutter outline of a human body, marked to show the location of anything that warrants a closer look ... [ MORE]
As a huge storm of snow and ice covers much of the Midwest and Northeast, more than 40 RDU flights to Chicago, New York and other cities have been scrubbed so far today.
Most of the cancellations posted online were scheduled before noon.
Expect more cancellations this morning and later in the day as snow and ice pile up on airport runways elsewhere in the country -- while the Triangle enjoys an unseasonably warm, damp day. The RDU temperature at 6:45 a.m. was 64 degrees.
Check your airline. Check RDU's flight status page.
Fifteen flights at RDU Airport were listed as canceled this evening, and more than 20 Wednesday morning flights also were scratched.
The affected destinations included New York, Chicago, Boston, Hartford, Detroit, St. Louis and Indianapolis.
Expect more cancellations as snow and ice pile up on airport runways in the Midwest and Northeast. Check your airline. Check RDU's flight status page.
Triangle air travelers started to feel the effects of a winter weather moving toward the Northeast today. Snow and ice are clogging parts of the Midwest, and 30 RDU flights were scratched this morning.
[Updated 11pm 2/1/11: More than 20 flights scheduled Wednesday morning at RDU have been cancelled.]
Expect more cancellations. Check your airline. Check RDU's flight status page.
Heaps of snow in the northeast caused airline delays and cancellations at Raleigh-Durham International Airport Wednesday night and Thursday morning, but most flight schedules returned to normal in the afternoon.
The snow forced the Carolina Hurricanes to spend the night on Long Island after their 4-2 victory over the New York Islanders Wednesday.
But they won’t be late to their own party – the NHL All-Star Game scheduled Sunday in the Canes’ RBC Center. The team’s charter plane left Long Island's Republic Airport for RDU late Thursday morning.
It's snowing some more in the Northeast, and that's affecting flights in and out of RDU Airport.
At least 20 departing flights this morning have been scratched, mostly to Boston, Hartford, and the New York area. Other affected destinations include Orlando and Washington.
Expect more cancellations. Check your airline. Check RDU's flight status page.
John Brantley, the airport director, shuddered at the idea that thousands of hockey fans, corporate types and media could fly into RDU this week, arriving in a big new terminal that looked finished but was half empty.
So it was worth an extra half-million dollars, he says, to get the $570 million Terminal 2 completed and opened four weeks ahead of schedule -- in time for the 2011 NHL All-Star Weekend. ... [MORE
