Annually, the County gives each airline an allocation of how many seats they can fly. However, if airlines sell too many of them, the County withdraws a portion of their allocation. For the 1999-2000 plan year , the County authorized airlines to fly 13.0 million airplane seats in and out of John Wayne. Airport management expected the airlines to provide a passenger-served level of approximately 7.7 million passenger . They actually served 7.6 million and the remaining 5.4 million seats went unused.
Airlines profit by filling their planes with passengers.
Airlines maximize seat utilization by offering discount fares to pleasure travelers, who fill seats not purchased by high-paying business people. Clearly, this is not happening in Orange County. A 1996 study by Las Vegas found that John Wayne flights had the highest percentage of empty seats of any of the 41 airports around the country that fly there. Let s be absolutely clear about what is going on. Seats remain empty at John Wayne because the County and Newport Beach cling to an out-dated plan to artificially limit the airport.