Frontier Airlines will establish a permanent base at DFW Airport. Frontier, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, will open the base with 120 pilots, 220 flight attendants and 30 maintenance workers.
Frontier now flies non-stop to 21 destinations from DFW. This month, the carrier added four new cities: Cleveland, Ohio, New York-LaGuardia, San Juan, Puerto Rico and Montego Bay, Jamaica.
"It's fantastic," says Chief Executive Barry Biffle. "Everybody's wanting to move here because the economic activity's so great. It's such a great place to live. All that activity is really good for air travel. It's really exciting for us to open this new base and be able to serve all these folks from North Texas."
DFW Airport has grown to the second busiest in the world. Last week, the airport announced plans to expand Terminals A and C and build a sixth terminal, adding a total of 24 gates.
"We have this great central U.S. location that we talk about all the time," says DFW Airport Vice President of Airline Relations Milton de la Paz. "From DFW, you can reach any major city in North America within a four hour flight or less."
Crew members with Frontier say many currently commute from their base in Denver to fly routes to and from DFW.
"It was just difficult. We talked a lot about it," says Flight Attendant Kirsten Laufenberg. "We kept praying they would open a base here because it had been rumored, so when they finally did, everybody was absolutely thrilled."
Laufenberg lived in the area after graduating college but moved to Denver when she got married. She says she still has family in here, and her daughter went to college in North Texas.
"There are so many great things about the Dallas-Fort Worth area," she says. "You've got Fort Worth. You can go boot scootin', and they've got great restaurants. You have Dallas and all the museums, such a great nightlife and just a beautiful city. All the cities in between, everybody still has that great southern hospitality, which I've missed."
Biffle says the base will likely expand as demand grows at DFW Airport. Since 2019, Frontier has been the fastest growing carrier at the airport.
"It will be significantly larger than that over time, but I think what's really unique and is very telling about how great it is to be in North Texas: we didn't have to hire new pilots and flight attendants," Biffle says. "We had 100 percent of all the employees opening the base come in as transfers."
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