Southwest to build aircraft hangar, create 100 jobs at Reid airport

Southwest Airlines is expected to build a 130,000-square-foot aircraft maintenance hangar at Harry Reid International Airport in the next five years.

Representatives of Dallas-based Southwest — the busiest commercial air carrier at the Las Vegas airport — signed a 56-page ground lease and development agreement with Clark County last month. The hangar will be capable of accommodating three Boeing 737 jets at one time.

Clark County Department of Aviation Director Rosemary Vassiliadis said the lease agreement represents a significant investment in Las Vegas and assures continued growth of the airline at Reid.

She noted that the hangar is expected to create 100 jobs at the airport.

“And those employees will be based here and contribute to our Southern Nevada economy,” she said.

The new hangar will be located on 6.42 acres, east of Terminal 3 near Reid’s FedEx operation. Its location is roughly near where Air Force One routinely parks when the president visits Las Vegas.

Vassiliadis said she expects it will take three years from drafting engineering plans for the hangar to opening the doors for operation.

She said the hangar would help Southwest’s operations because it would provide a place to park planes that need maintenance work. There are restrictions on the kind of maintenance work that can be done at a terminal gate.

Vassiliadis said under terms of the lease agreement, Southwest must build the hangar within five years. Southwest would pay $364,000 annually for the ground lease on a 30-year term, she said. Until the hangar is completed, Southwest would pay half the annual rent on the vacant land.

A Southwest spokesman said there are no immediate plans to begin work on the project.

“We just built a 130,000-square-foot hangar in Denver which opened in March,” said Southwest spokesman Dan Landson. “There is room for three 737s inside and eight outside. That hangar supports our western U.S. operations and complements our Phoenix hangar project, which is currently being expanded from three bays to six.”

The 9-month-old Denver hangar cost $100 million to build and houses room for offices, training and warehousing to support the carrier’s technical operations team.

Landson said the Denver operation sees just over 290 departures a day “so it made sense for us to have a facility that can handle work needed to keep our planes safely moving throughout our network.”

“Since we don’t have any plans currently, we don’t have much else to share other than we appreciate Clark County and the airport’s approval of the land lease as we look toward potential future growth in Las Vegas,” Landson said.

Southwest, which is expanding its fleet, is scheduled to operate 218 daily flights in January, a 31 percent increase from a year earlier. It flies nonstop from Las Vegas to 66 destinations.

In October, Southwest confirmed that by March it would have the highest number of daily flights from Las Vegas in the airline’s history. The airline’s latest schedule of flight bookings listed 243 daily departures by March, beating the previous record of 240 that Southwest had in 2009.

A new schedule is expected to be released Thursday.

The carrier’s published schedule offers an additional 12 flights from February 2023’s published schedule. Las Vegas is now the airline’s second largest operation in the nation behind Denver.

Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.