Frontier Airlines: What it sees in small NJ airport where 14 others failed

Mercer County, New Jersey, residents may have noticed the blizzard of print and radio ads, the roadside billboards and the signs hanging in local shopping malls advertising the flights that Frontier Airlines has begun offering at Trenton-Mercer Airport.

What they didn’t know was that Frontier plans to make the little-used Ewing airport its East Coast hub and is pulling its domestic flights out of Philadelphia International, where routes cannot be expanded easily.

Since November, in very rapid succession, Frontier has initiated flights to Orlando from Trenton-Mercer and has announced plans for nine more destinations from the Scotch Road airport, all of them set to begin by mid-April.

The Denver-based airline flies the majority of its flights on routes originating from Denver International Airport, but it needs a base of operations on the East Coast, and Trenton fits perfectly, said Daniel Shurz, Frontier’s vice president of finance.