Second airline at Manchester airport this summer

Manchester-Boston Regional Airport Director Ted Kitchens welcomes Sun Country Airlines to MHT in a speech during an Aug. 22 event after its firstever landing there. (Photo by Trisha Nail)

Despite gray clouds overlooking Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT) on Aug. 22, skies directly above remained blue as an orange-and-white livery airplane landed on the runway.

As the plane received a water salute greeting from fire engines, its landing ushered another airline to MHT, establishing a commercial aviation connection from the Great Lakes to the Granite State.

Sun Country Airlines is MHT’s fourth airline arrival since 2021, with its route from Manchester to Minneapolis, and vice versa, marking MHT’s farthest westward flight distance.

It’s the second new airline to hit the Queen City airstrip this summer after Breeze Airways, and the fifth to announce service to the airport in the past four years. That includes JetBlue, which will arrive to similar fanfare as Breeze and Sun Country in January 2025.

Marketed as an ultra-low-cost carrier, Sun Country is offering nonstop service between MHT and Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) once weekly at starting rates from $79. Its first arrival to MHT brought 108 passengers to Manchester, and the following departure flew 105 people back to Minneapolis, according to MHT Airport Director Ted Kitchens.

Manchester Mayor Jay Ruais and MHT and Sun Country Airlines officials celebrate the carrier’s arrival at the Queen City airport Aug. 22 with a ribbon-cutting (Photo by Trisha Nail)

The director said he hasn’t personally visited Minneapolis before, but he hopes to make the trip via the new airline, potentially to visit Sun Country’s headquarters and meet its planning team.

“I’m a big Prince fan, so I also want to go look at Paisley Park,” Kitchens said of the late Minneapolis-grown pop musician. Prince’s signature “Love Symbol” was emblazoned onto an appropriately themed cake at an event celebrating Sun Country’s inaugural MHT flights.

Colton Snow, Sun Country’s chief marketing officer, said Twin Cities influence like that encourages the airline to seek out tourists.

“At Sun Country, we’re really focused on leisure travel,” said Colton Snow, Sun Country’s chief marketing officer, after a ribboncutting ceremony. “That’s people largely paying with their own money to go places — going on vacation and visiting relatives.”

Snow, who made his first-ever New Hampshire visit onboard the Thursday flight, said there was a lot of enthusiasm for a bridge to the state, offering Midwesterners a “gateway to New England” for sights like fall foliage and New Englanders affordable flights to Minnesota.

With the addition of Manchester, Sun Country now flies to 108 airports, creating a total footprint of 122 destinations for the company, Snow said, owing some of its continued successful expansion to onboard offerings for passengers.

“We have a really comfortable experience with streaming and in-flight entertainment, charging ports, reclining seats and complimentary beverages,” he said.

At the welcoming event, Manchester Mayor Jay Ruais said in a speech that the airline’s presence is also a sign of growth for the city.

“This is just further evidence that Manchester is on the move,” Ruais said.

As for MHT’s development, Airport Director Ted Kitchens said it was his hope in stepping into his role in fall 2018 that the airport scale up its operations and presence in the region, with Sun Country’s service being just the latest milestone under his leadership.

“I think the goal was to help turn the trajectory around that I inherited, and I think we’re accomplishing that,” Kitchens said. “Obviously, the pandemic set us back a bit, but we’re overcoming those numbers and that inertia.”

Kitchens said he felt it was the pandemic itself that aided in getting Sun Country’s planes on the ground in Manchester, citing a resilient state economy being attractive to the airline.

A close-up of the first Sun Country Airlines plane to land at MHT shows its orange, white and blue livery with the carrier’s logo on the tail fin. (Photo by Trisha Nail)

“I would argue we were stronger coming out of it than going into it,” Kitchens said. “I think the other thing was the large demographic changes that we saw with migration and how many out-of-state buyers were buying homes here.”

He noted that MHT reviewed data from a local company doing migration studies, which Kitchens used when pitching to airlines like Sun Country to show statistics of people coming from states outside the Northeast, like California and Colorado.

“That really opened their eyes, because you can connect over Minneapolis to those westbound destinations,” he said. “They knew that if families were moving, even if moving back (to New England), they still may have stayed in California or Colorado communities for a good long time.”

Now, MHT has eight of 13 major certificated U.S. air carriers, Kitchens said, and he hopes additional flights via existing airlines or more new carriers can take MHT’s connections further westbound, with adequate support from flyers.

“It really is up to the community now to make sure their voices be heard by how they’re booking their flights,” Kitchens said.

“We used to have Denver, Phoenix and Las Vegas connections, and those desires (to reconnect) are still there, but it’s going to take a little bit longer for us to get there again.”