Rockford Airport Loses NorthWest

Bad news for ORH. Our model airport, Rockford, that also had no commercial service like ORH got themselves restarted with "second-tier" airlines like TransMeridian, Allegiant and Hooters and and charters like FunJet and Apple Vactions. They were able to prove to these airlines that they could support leisure airlines that flew a few times per week.

The next logical step was to get an airline to service the business traveler with mutliple flights to a hub. To that end, NorthWest began service January of this year with multiple daily flights to Detroit. The question was would a secondary airport like Rockford be able to put up the numbers for NorthWest to stay.

Northwest has announced that they are pulling out of Rockford the end of this month... This is not good news for secondary airports like ORH trying to recruit multiple daily flights. Maybe the destiny of airports like Rockford and ORH are to be solely leisure airports???