Delta Air Lines is growing to 29 destinations out of Austin. Delta currently flies to 25 destinations from Austin. Along with their regional partners, they operate 22% of flights and offer 19% of seats out of the airport.

They’re number two behind Southwest, which offers 39% of flights and 41% of seats. The two carriers are duking it out to be anchor tenant for the new airport lease and use agreement as a new concourse gets built. Delta says they see themselves growing to Southwest’s current size in Austin.

But Southwest isn’t sitting still. They think they could grow by 50%. Austin Business Journal quotes Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan: (HT: Enilria)

[O]ur intent is to continue to grow our share of the market here…People are flocking to Austin because of the business environment and opportunities. We’re going to move capacity where the opportunity is, and that growth is here.

The ability to grow from 130 to well over 200 means we could just serve a lot more cities, a lot more frequency…Where we’re headed would make Austin the largest airport and largest service we have in the whole state of Texas.

This isn’t actually going to happen, at least not right away. Each airline is jockeying for as many ‘preferential use gates’ at the airport as possible. Then they’ll schedule the minimum number of flights to keep all of their gates. Their overall gate usage will go down.

In other words, the goal is to grab as much real estate as possible as use each piece as little as possible while blocking competition. These agreements are negotiated locally. For instance, New Orleans has required as few as 2 flights a day for an airline to lock up a gate, while Cleveland has required just 3 flights a day out of a gate (8 is reasonable full use, while airlines do push 10 flights a day from a gate when they need to).

Southwest has slowed its growth to a trickle as part of the new regime that imposed bag fees, expiration of travel credits, seat fees, and devalued points. But they’re talking about going from 130 flights a day to “well over 200” from Austin? That’s posturing and its also a recipe for losses, if done over any reasonably short period of time.

American Airlines had poorly-timed flights in many cases, but their big ramp up was a money-loser. Austin is a good market, but it’s not a good market when everyone is growing capacity by 50%.

Southwest Airlines is bigger today than Delta by a significant margin. But Southwest, with its fleet limited to 737s, isn’t able to operate long haul or even Hawaii from Austin.

Delta has joint venture partnerships with Aeromexico and Air France KLM. Today KLM only operates to Amsterdam 3 days a week. There’s been a good bit of speculation about a second Europe flight, and eventually Austin’s first Asia flight from Delta JV partner Korean Air.

Southwest will have a hard time competing with those, along with the 30,000 square foot club lounge Delta plans to build in Austin – complete with boarding directly from the lounge if possible.