Big bet on small jets: Can Contour Airlines succeed where

The name Con­tour Air­lines, not to be con­fused with Ger­man leisure car­ri­er Con­dor Air­lines, prob­a­bly doesn’t ring a bell if you live in the Caribbean. Yet over the past few months, the car­ri­er bet­ter known in the US than in the Caribbean has qui­et­ly been lay­ing the ground­work to be­come a strong com­peti­tor in the re­gion. On Oc­to­ber 5 it will add an­oth­er des­ti­na­tion to its bud­ding Caribbean net­work when it be­gins fly­ing twice week­ly be­tween Trinidad’s Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port (POS) and Do­mini­ca’s Dou­glas–Charles Air­port (DOM), with one-stop, same-plane con­nec­tions to St. Thomas (STT) and Puer­to Ri­co (SJU).

The ser­vice means T&T and Do­mini­ca will once again be di­rect­ly con­nect­ed by air, mere months af­ter ma­jor­i­ty state-owned Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) end­ed ser­vice to the is­land, cit­ing al­most $5 mil­lion in loss­es.

But how does Con­tour Air­lines plan to suc­ceed on a route that CAL strug­gled to make prof­itable? A big part of that an­swer boils down to avi­a­tion eco­nom­ics 101. Caribbean Air­lines op­er­at­ed the route with an ATR 72-600, a tur­bo­prop de­signed for short-haul fly­ing, out­fit­ted with 68-72 seats de­pend­ing on the con­fig­u­ra­tion. Tur­bo­props are com­mon­ly used in the Caribbean be­cause of their ef­fi­cien­cy and their CASM (Cost per Avail­able Seat Mile) is low­er when full. At the high­er 72-seat con­fig­u­ra­tion, Caribbean Air­lines need­ed 60 rev­enue pas­sen­gers per sec­tor to meet the in­dus­try-stan­dard load fac­tor of 84 per cent.