Ontario International Airport

Located just over two miles from the Ontario central business district, the International Airport of LA/Ontario is owned by the city of Los Angeles. This airport sees over 6 million people go through it each year.

The main carrier which uses this airport is Southwest Airlines and around half of all passengers which pass through here use their services. The next four main airlines used by this airport’s passengers are United Airlines with over 8%, Delta Airlines with less than 8%, US Airways with 7% and the American Airlines with 6%. This airport is used by UPS as a gateway for the packages which go and come from South California.

The total area covered by the airport is around 1700 acres (around 690 hectares), with a total of two runways. After LAX and SNA (John Wayne Airport), this is the third biggest airport of this area. Usually this airport is not as crowded as the LAX and it’s one of the best alternate airports in the United States. It is used by UPS as a hub, plus it’s a big distribution point for the FedEx Express.

Since it has big runways (one of them is bigger than any LAX runway), big aircraft sometimes use it as an alternate option, when LAX is not accessible for whatever reason. The reason why this airport is very important is because large trans-Pacific airplanes which come to LAX might not have sufficient fuel at the end of the journey to go to another big airport. Since Ontario has a small number of connecting flights and since the customs facilities are limited, people don’t usually disembark from these rerouted flights. Usually the planes will just refuel and they will go to LAX when the conditions for landing are better. The distance from LA is around 38 miles.