Breeze Airways flies its routes from Raleigh-Durham International Airport on Airbus A220-300 aircraft.
Breeze Airways
The fastest-growing airline at Raleigh-Durham International Airport is adding more nonstop destinations from the Triangle.
Breeze Airways will begin flying between RDU and Birmingham, Alabama, and Tallahassee, Florida, this summer. Breeze will fly to Tallahassee on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays starting July 2 and to Birmingham on Mondays and Fridays starting July 3. Both flights will operate year-around.
Breeze, which favors routes not served by other airlines, will be the only one flying nonstop to Birmingham and Tallahassee from RDU.
“We like to serve the underserved. And we believe RDU has become one of those perfect markets for that,” Trent Porter, the airline’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. “RDU seems like it’s got a lot of pent-up demand, which has allowed us to grow as much as we have.”
Breeze made its debut in the Triangle in February 2023, and Porter said RDU will become the busiest of the more than 80 airports in its network this spring. The airline more than doubled the number of passengers it served at RDU last year to nearly 660,000 and will establish a crew base at the airport in March, with more than 200 pilots and flight crew.
The airline has helped bring new life to RDU’s once-sleepy Terminal 1, said Michael Languth, the airport’s president and CEO.
“They’re about almost 5% of our market right now in terms of total customers carried. And in January 2023, they were zero,” Landguth said. “That’s a pretty big ramp up.”
The new flights bring the number of nonstop destinations for Breeze from RDU to 39, including its first international flight from the Triangle to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, starting March 4. A second international flight, to Montego Bay, Jamaica, has been postponed until December because of damage on the island from Hurricane Melissa last fall.
By comparison, Delta Air Lines, the busiest carrier at RDU in terms of passengers, flies nonstop to 23 cities.
A business model built around leisure travel
Breeze is able to serve so many markets from RDU in part because it uses Airbus A220-300 aircraft that seat 137 passengers, said Lukas Johnson, the chief commercial officer. The planes are more efficient than smaller regional jets, Johnson said, but not too big for smaller markets such as Birmingham and Tallahassee.
Landguth says Breeze founder and CEO David Neeleman has found a successful formula of a low-cost carrier that offers first class and economy seats, with a section with more legroom in between. And the airline is tops at RDU in on-time performance, Landguth said.
“He’s focused on that,” he said of Neeleman. “Customers want good value and to get there on time, and I think he’s done a really good job of executing that.”
Strong demand from RDU has prompted Breeze to add more routes rather than increase the number of times a week it flies existing ones. Porter said the airline is able to fill the seats on its planes flying two or three days a week.
“When you operate a daily schedule, you typically are catering more to the business community and hoping for some higher fares,” he said. “We’re going to continue with our business model of catering to leisure travelers, visiting friends and relatives. They typically are less dependent on that daily schedule and more interested in the pricing and getting there efficiently.”
This story was originally published February 24, 2026 at 10:00 AM.
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Richard Stradling covers transportation for The News & Observer. Planes, trains and automobiles, plus ferries, bicycles, scooters and just plain walking. He’s been a reporter or editor for 38 years, including the last 26 at The N&O. 919-829-4739, rstradling@newsobserver.com.