=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SF Gate. The original article can be found on SFGate.com here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=3D/chronicle/archive/2004/02= /06/BUGMD4QA8U1.DTL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday, February 6, 2004 (SF Chronicle) Virgin USA keeps SFO in contention/Airport 1 of 3 finalists for headquarters David Armstrong, Chronicle Staff Writer A company that brought pie in the sky -- literally -- to airline passengers will fly executives to San Francisco International Airport next week, looking for a sweet offer and dangling promises of new jobs to lift the Bay Area economy. Virgin USA, an embryonic, low-cost carrier that hopes to get off the ground by late this year, has narrowed to three its list of possible headquarters sites. SFO is a finalist, along with Boston and Washington Dulles airport. "We will be at SFO early next week, meeting with David Crane from Gov. (Arnold) Schwarzenegger's office and (SFO director) John Martin and his team, " said Todd Pawlowski, Virgin USA's director of customer service. "We're looking for the airport and city that will be the best fit for us." SFO spokesman Michael McCarron said officials plan to take Virgin USA executives on a tour "at the airport and off-airport," to show off prospective facilities. He acknowledged that Virgin USA exists only on paper at the moment, but expressed confidence in Richard Branson, the carrier's founder, who is the majority owner of London's Virgin Atlantic Airways. "If Branson can make it happen, he usually does," McCarron said. SFO handles more than 80 percent of Northern California's international flights, including a daily flight between San Francisco and London operated by Virgin Atlantic. But with soft transatlantic and transpacific travel during the past few years and the rise of low-cost carriers with discounted fares, SFO has recently been courting low-cost carriers. Landing Virgin USA would be a coup for the airport, which, uncharacteristically, has several unused gates. Pawlowski said the airline hopes to pick a headquarters site by the end = of the month. Virgin USA, he said, would start out with a staff of 400 to 500. "Within three years, our plan is to have somewhere north of 3,000 employees -- pilots, cabin crew, maintenance workers, reservations agents -- with somewhere north of 2,000 of those in the headquarters city." Schwarzenegger has lobbied Branson, asking him to base the new airline in California. Los Angeles was considered, but did not make Branson's short list. Virgin USA would be a low-cost carrier serving chiefly U.S. domestic routes. It would be 25 percent owned by Branson, the flamboyant British entrepreneur who founded Virgin Records and also owns Virgin Megastores and Virgin Atlantic. Virgin Atlantic has brought Branson's show-biz flair to air travel. The carrier offers fresh-baked lamb and rosemary pies from Square Pie, a popular London food company, on London flights. It recently introduced a patented airplane seat that turns over and morphs into a fully reclining bed. It also opened stand-up bars on its aircraft and rolled out sophisticated electronic entertainment. Pawlowski said he hopes Virgin USA, with an as yet unnamed U.S. partner, will start flying late this year or early in 2005. "We are buying aircraft from Boeing and Airbus," he said. "We don't make money by having $35 million airplanes sitting on the ground. We feel a sense of urgency. We are eager to get in the game and start playing." In an earlier Chronicle report, Bay Area officials were said to have pitched SFO's accessibility by BART from low-cost areas of Contra Costa and San Mateo counties and touted the Bay Area's generally benign weather. E-mail David Armstrong at davidarmstrong@sfchronicle .com.=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2004 SF Chronicle