ATA ending service in home city of Indianapolis

INDIANAPOLIS -- Bankrupt carrier ATA's financial problems are forcing it to halt flights to and from its hometown of Indianapolis after 32 years of operations there, company executives said Tuesday.\n"This is a very sad day for the company and yet we're trying to view it as a day where we're looking toward the future as well as recognizing the importance of our history," ATA Chief Executive and President John Denison said. "We also simply had to face reality."\nAll ATA flights to and from the Indianapolis International Airport will end Jan. 10. The company is also ending service to Denver and San Juan, Puerto Rico.\nATA said it would continue to keep its corporate headquarters in Indianapolis, and renewed a five-year lease of office space at the Indianapolis airport.\nDenison said the airline had no plans to reinstate Indianapolis flights in the future and that it had likely kept flights to and from the city for too long.\nJo Lynn Garing, a spokeswoman for Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, said the city would urge the airline to one day resume flights to the city.\n"We're disappointed. We hope that these moves will position ATA to once again fly in its hometown," Garing said.\nCompany executives said the Indianapolis flight decision was aimed at helping ATA emerge from bankruptcy by early 2006.\nPreviously, ATA announced the cancellation of several other routes affecting cities including Boston, Minneapolis and Newark, N.J.\nAfter the routes are discontinued, officials said the airline will have 64 departures each day throughout its system, or about half the daily departures now.\nATA is maintaining its 10-month-old code-sharing agreement with Southwest Airlines to about 50 cities. The deal allows passengers on one airline to fly to destinations served by the other. Despite the route cancellations, Southwest still expects to earn at least $25 million from the code-sharing agreement, spokeswoman Melanie Jones said.\n"We expect the service reductions will have minimal impact on our own operations," Jones said.\nATA officials said it was too early to say how many jobs would be affected by the route reductions.\nPassengers who have booked tickets on the canceled routes will receive refunds or help with alternative travel plans. ATA spokeswoman Michelle Foley declined to say how many passengers flew on the routes or how many tickets had been sold for flights after the cancellation date.\nATA, which is owned by ATA Holdings Corp., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October 2004. Once the nation's 10th largest passenger carrier, it has cut more than 3,000 jobs since it began downsizing from a work force of 7,800 people two years ago.\nThe airline had been the busiest airline at the Indianapolis airport, with 41 daily flights and 22 percent of all passengers, before dropping to just three daily flights since its bankruptcy filing.\n"It looks like ATA's traffic base is slowly eroding," said Michael Boyd, president of The Boyd Group, an Evergreen, Colo.-based aviation industry consulting firm. He called ATA's abandonment of Indianapolis surprising. "This is like Sears Roebuck moving to China"