Having At Last Overcome The Economic Downturn And Self-Inflicted Ownership Discontinuity Ontario International Airport Ridership Back To Where It Was Eighteen Years Ago

Ridership at Ontario International Airport in 2024 eclipsed its most significant milestone since the City of Ontario re-attained ownership of the aerodrome from Los Angeles in 2015 and reassumed its management in 2016.
Last year, more than 7 million air travelers passed through Ontario International’s gates on their ways to both foreign and domestic destinations. The 7 million mark is of consequence because that is very close to the airport’s historic 7.2 million passenger high point which occurred in 2007. It was the sharp decline in ridership into and out of Ontario that began with that year’s local, state and national financial collapse and a more than five-year-running economic downturn sometimes referred to as “the Great Recession” which triggered an effort by Ontario officials, led by Councilman Alan Wapner, to wrest ownership and control of the airport back from the City of Los Angeles.
In 1967, when Ontario Airport had a sand flea-infested gravel parking lot and fewer than 200,000 passengers passing through its gates per year, the Ontario City Council entered into a joint powers agreement with the City of Los Angeles in which the larger city’s Department of Airports was to take over aviation operations in Ontario. Los Angeles officials, with their control over gate positions at Los Angeles International Airport, was able to induce a multitude of airlines to fly into and out of the smaller facility.
By 1969, flights out of Ontario had dramatically increased and would continue to do so as, Los Angeles World Airports, the corporate entity running the Los Angeles Municipal Department of Airports, used its influence with various airlines. Continental Airlines, PSA, United, American Airlines, Hughes Air West, and Delta established routes to and from Ontario. Though a benchmark of 10 million passengers at the airport by 1975 was not achieved, Los Angeles World Airports still assiduously promoted Ontario International. Under the management and care of Los Angeles officials, in 1981, a modern, second east-to-west runway at Ontario International was built, necessitating the removal of the old northeast-to-southwest runway.
By the early 1980s Los Angeles had met all the performance criteria laid out in the 1967 joint powers agreement. The City of Ontario was at that time led by Mayor Robert Ellingwood, who was resistant to the concept of Ontario complying with the terms of the 1967 pact and turning ownership of the airport over to Los Angeles. In 1985, during Ellingwood’s brief absence from the city, four members of the Ontario City Council as it was then composed voted to deed Ontario Airport to the City of Los Angeles for no consideration, pursuant to what was considered a public benefit transfer that most local officials, with a few notable exceptions such as Ellingwood, believed would be advantageous.
Indeed, over the four decades from 1967 until 2007, the relationship between Ontario and Los Angeles vis-à-vis the airport could not have been more positive or cordial. All told, Los Angeles instituted some $550 million worth of improvements to the airport, including paving its parking lot, modernizing its runways, including the widening of taxiways and the addition of storm drains. Ontario Airport’s landing and take-off paths were converted into the longest such civilian facilities in Southern California, and Los Angeles erected a state-of-the-art control tower, and constructed two ultra-modern terminals at a cost of $270 million, augmented with a world class concourse. 
Throughout the massive financial lull of the Great Recession, however, air travel dropped off significantly and airlines, in an effort to shield themselves from the continuing economic decline, began cutting back on flights, particularly to locations outside heavy population centers. Beginning in late 2007 and until early 2014, passenger traffic at Ontario International declined steadily.
In 2010, Wapner, initiated a campaign aimed at prying control and ownership of Ontario International Airport away from Los Angeles. Wapner approached this task by initiating a series of personal and vindictive attacks on Los Angeles officials, most prominently Los Angeles World Airports Executive Director Gina Marie Lindsey, claiming, spuriously, that they were responsible for the decline in ridership at Ontario Airport. Los Angeles World Airports and Lindsey were deliberately manipulating the situation to raise costs at Ontario International and thereby minimize both ridership and revenues there as part of a plot to increase revenue and gate numbers at Los Angeles International Airport, Wapner and his city council colleagues alleged.
Meanwhile the number of passengers at Ontario International which had retreated from the 7,207,150 in 2007 to 6,232,975 in 2008 to 4,861,110 in 2009 to 4,812,578 in 2010 to 4,540,694 in 2011, continued to decline in the face of the contretemps between Ontario and Los Angeles, falling to 4,296,459 in 2012 and hitting rock bottom at 3,971,136 in 2013. Amidst this, the City of Ontario joined with San Bernardino County in forming the Ontario International Airport Authority in 2012, designating Wapner as the president/chairman of the authority’s board of directors. What Ontario officials clearly had in mind was that the authority would oversee the airport when Los Angeles was out of the picture.
In 2013, Ontario, represented by the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, sued Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports, claiming neglect and negligence, breach of contract and misfeasance in the operation and management of Ontario International Airport, along with damages.
In 2014, however, as the economy began to rebound and air travel in general started to pick up around the country, ridership at Ontario International Airport zoomed to 4,127,280. That did not result in Ontario officials rethinking the wisdom of litigating against the megalopolis that had assisted it in building Ontario Airport into what was certainly one of the leading hubs in the country and arguably the nation’s  most noteworthy subregional airport. Nor did they desist in the vitriolic attacks on Los Angeles and its officials.
Of note was that despite suing Los Angeles over the airport, Ontario remained entirely dependent on Los Angeles for the facility’s management and operation. The smaller city had nothing in the way of personnel or operational expertise to keep the extremely sophisticated and complex systems, departments, equipment and facilities an airport entails functional or safe.
In 2015 Ontario Airport continued on the road to recovery, with the number of passengers reaching 4,209,311. That August, Los Angeles moved to settle the lawsuit Ontario had brought against it, agreeing to return the airport, lock, stock and barrel to the smaller municipality to its east, conditional upon Ontario covering operational, improvement and financing costs that the taxpayers in Los Angeles had been absorbing for decades.
In December 2015, Los Angeles and Ontario signed an agreement finalizing the transfer as of November 1, 2016, with Ontario paying Los Angeles $60 million out of its various operating funds and another $30 million taken out of its reserves, and committing to make payments of $50 million over five years and $70 million in the final five years of the ten-year ownership transition. In addition, Ontario absorbed $60 million of the airport’s bond debt.
As part of the settlement worked out between Los Angeles and Ontario, Los Angeles graciously agreed to continue its management/operational oversight of the airport until noon November 1, 2016. In 2016, ridership at Ontario Airport continued to go up, to 4,251,903.
Of note, when Ontario brought in its own management team for the post-November 1, 2016 era of Ontario International Airport’s existence, it in large measure cannibalized management and operational personnel from Los Angeles World Airports. In the interregnum between the settlement of the lawsuit in August of 2015 and Ontario’s full reassumption of ownership of the airport in November 2016, the Ontario International Airport Authority in January 2016 exercised its nescient power as the overseer of the airport to bring in Kelly Fredericks, the president and CEO of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation and the manager of T.F. Green Airport in Providence, Rhode Island to serve as Ontario International Airport’s executive manager. Fredericks was to acclimate himself to Ontario during the final nine months of Los Angeles World Airport’s operation of Ontario International Airport and take over upon Ontario’s assumption of the facility once more. The department heads and submanagers at the airport under Fredericks both pre-November 2016 and post-November 2016 were Los Angeles World Airports veterans. As things developed, Fredericks and his political masters on the Ontario City Council and the Ontario International Airport Authority did not see eye-to-eye and he departed from his post at the airport in July 2017. The airport authority turned to another former executive with Los Angeles World Airports, Mark Thorpe, to replace Fredericks.
When push came to shove and Ontario’s political leadership needed the necessary talent to keep planes taking off and landing at Ontario International Airport, they turned to the very people they had claimed were running the airport into the ground.
Under the combined guidance of Fredericks and Thorpe, ridership at Ontario International Airport increased in 2017 to 4,552,225. With Thorpe as the titular leader of the airport, Ontario saw the number of passengers continue to increase, hitting 5,115,894 in 2018 and 5,583,732 in 2019.
Though Wapner, some of his council colleagues and those in their orbit sought to credit the jump in ridership at the airport to Ontario reasserting itself and seizing the aerodrome from Los Angeles, the reality was that the recovering economy had boosted air flight across the board. Indeed, a comparison to Los Angeles International Airport’s passenger numbers at the same time demonstrates that the Southern California region was a popular departure and destination venue, and that Los Angeles officials did a better job of capitalizing on that opportunity than did their counterparts in Ontario.
In 2015, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 51.56 million. In 2016, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 54.2 million. In 2017, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 58.07 million. In 2018, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 87,533,177. In 2019, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 88,068,013.
In 2020, Wapner and the rest of the Ontario City Council and the Ontario International Airport Authority were given a stern lesson in economic reality and the way in which causation and factors that account for that reality can be willingly misinterpreted to be wielded against reality’s bystanders. That year, the coronavirus/COVID pandemic resulted in a reduction of air travel even greater than what occurred during the Great Recession. At that point, however, Wapner and his city council colleagues were in complete charge and control over the airport, and could not blame the drop in total ridership at Ontario International Airport to 2,538,482, a decline of 54.54 percent over the previous year, on the City of Los Angeles.
By 2022, lockdowns and quarantines had been discontinued. In the years since, the economy has pretty much restored itself.
Nevertheless, Ontario Airport Officials do not have any leverage they can utilize to convince carriers to fly into or out of Ontario International. The growth that has taken place at Ontario International Airport since Ontario took possession of it is a fraction of what occurred historically when Los Angeles ran it. At present, Aeromexicol; Alaska Airlines and its affiliate Alaska Sky West; American Airlines and its affiliate American Eagle; China Airlines; Delta Airlines and Delta Connection; Frontier Airlines; Hawaiian Airlines; Jet Blue; Southwest Airlines; and Volaris fly out of and into Ontario International.
Los Angeles International Airport accommodates 76 air carries on a daily basis. Los Angeles International Airport, which averages 1,578 take-offs and landings daily compared to Ontario International’s 146 take-offs and landings, on average, daily. Had Ontario International Airport maintained its affiliation with Los Angeles International Airport, the roster of airlines flying into and out of Ontario International would likely be double that which it is currently.
With the anomaly of the pandemic and its 18-to-20-month paralysis from the imposed societal shutdown aside, Ontario’s ownership and management of Ontario International Airport has corresponded with an expansion of the local, state and national economy. That economic advancement was reflected in the 6,430,033 passengers the airport serviced in 2023 and the jump to 7,084,864 passengers there from January 1, 2024 until December 31, 2024.
Ontario International’s 2024 numbers are a 10.2 percent improvement over 2023 and 27 percent more than pre-pandemic 2019. Citing those statistics, airport officials on January 23 put out a statement that Ontario International is “the fastest growing among medium- and large-size airports in California. The 2024 count also represents a 67 percent increase since 2016, when Ontario International Airport was transferred to local control from the City of Los Angeles.”
In addition, for 2024 at Ontario, the number of domestic travelers totaled 6,645,968, an increase of 10.5 percent year-over-year, while the number of international fliers grew by 5.1 percent to 438,896, the highest in the airport’s history. 
“We believed the 7 million passenger mark was achievable in 2024 and indeed it was,” said Wapner. “It was a milestone year that positions our airport to handle increasing demand for air travel in the region. While some California airports are still trying to restore passenger volumes post-pandemic, Ontario is prospering thanks to the economic and population growth in the Inland Empire, the faith and trust of our airline partners and the confidence of air travelers who know they’ll have a world-class experience with us.”
Atif Elkadi, OIAA chief executive officer, noted that December passenger volume grew by nearly 10 percent to 603,886, marking the 46th straight month of year-over-year increases. December was also the eighth consecutive month with the passenger count exceeding 600,000.
“We pride ourselves on strong performances month after month and delivering the first-rate, hassle-free experiences our customers expect. The December and year-end numbers are testament to the hard work and dedication of our staff and partners to make Ontario the airport of choice in Southern California,” Elkadi said

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