Virgin America may land at JWA

Virgin America airlines will fly five daily departures out of John Wayne Airport pending the results of a noise test, officials announced Tuesday.

The news comes as the Orange County airport has seen a 10% decrease in passenger traffic over the past year, following a national trend of dwindling passenger numbers.

While many large air carriers are scaling back their service, Virgin has been more-or-less continually expanding since its launch in late 2007.

“It’s actually an interesting market and because we’re relatively small and nimble and flexible, it’s actually been a good place for us,” said Virgin spokeswoman Abby Lunardini.

In the past year John Wayne saw one of its airlines, Aloha, stop service out of the airport altogether and saw big carriers such as American and United cut flights from their schedules. Meanwhile, Southwest increased its flights to partially fill the void.

Airport spokeswoman Jenny Wedge said that John Wayne wants to increase passenger levels — the airport is down 15 departures per day from last year — but it’s hard in the present economy to find the demand.

Like Southwest, though, Virgin is set up to take advantage of the increasingly thrifty market.

“Virgin and Southwest are in good positions to keep growing their businesses because they’re low cost so their fares are more reasonable,” Wedge said.

All Virgin flights out of John Wayne will be between Orange County and San Francisco International Airport, the airline’s home base.

Other carriers such as United and American Eagle run from Orange County to San Francisco, but Virgin representatives say they have seen an increasing demand for business and leisure travelers along the route.

The airline planned to fly one of its 149-passenger A320 airplanes into the airport Tuesday morning for the noise test, but Santa Ana winds postponed the event until later this week, according to Wedge.

Pending the results of the test, service will start out of John Wayne on April 30.

The first daily departure each morning will be scheduled for 6:45 a.m. and the last arrival scheduled for 9:45 p.m.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at alan.blank@latimes.com.