Piedmont Triad International Airport (PTIA) is always seeking to add flights from low-cost carriers, so airport officials certainly don’t like to see those flights go away.

However, at a recent meeting of the Piedmont Triad Airport Authority, Kevin Baker, the executive director of PTIA, announced that Spirit Airlines was ceasing a regular flight to Florida.

“They are taking down the Fort Lauderdale flight for the fall,” Baker said this week, adding that the flight could return to the airport’s dance card at some point.

“We hope that flight will return with demand,” Baker said.

Over the last year and a half, air travel has been virtually impossible to predict and plan for airports and carriers due to the coronavirus pandemic. In recent months airline passengers have been returning to the skies. However, new fears about the spread of the virus could change that.  Things have been so hard to predict that the Airport Authority even stopped releasing some forward-looking stats based on future airline schedules that the Authority provided before the pandemic.

Baker said Spirit is maintaining a flight from PTIA to Orlando.

Price competitiveness for PTIA officials has been a prime concern for decades, with the airport contending for the same customers who use the larger airports in Raleigh and Charlotte. 

Baker said PTIA is currently working to attract more low-cost carriers, but it’s a tough time, he added, to land a deal since there’s so much uncertainty in the air.

“The push for low-cost carriers continues,” Barker said, “but right now, the whole industry is trying to figure out what it needs to look like moving forward.”