McKinney National Airport DTX: Plan Around Avelo Flight Days

"The terminal is designed to serve up to 1 million passengers annually, while providing a simple and accessible curb-to-cabin experience," McKinney National Airport Director Ken Carley said at a Sept. 24 press conference, about seven weeks before the first commercial flight.

The "simple" part is believable. The 46,000-square-foot terminal at 1910 FM 546 opens on Veterans Day, Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026, with four gates and one airline. What this airport asks of you is different from what DFW or Love Field asks. At those airports you choose a destination and then find a flight. At DTX the weekly calendar comes first. Avelo Airlines flies from McKinney Wednesday through Monday, and every route has its own fixed days. If you live in McKinney, the useful question is which days you can travel, and the schedule then tells you where you can go.

The weekly calendar is the route map

Here's the full schedule announced so far, pulled from the City of McKinney's Sept. 24 release and the city's June 30 announcement of the first routes.

The Denver details depend on which page you read. The table follows the city and Avelo releases. The airport's own homepage lists Denver as starting Dec. 17, and Community Impact's write-up shows a Sunday flight in place of Saturday, so check the exact day on AveloAir.com when you book.

Laid out by day of the week, the schedule turns some trips into easy choices and rules others out. No route lists a Tuesday, so a trip can never start or end at DTX on a Tuesday. Wednesday has only three options: Fort Myers, Atlanta and Denver. Thursday is the busy day, with six of the nine routes flying, and Las Vegas, Orlando, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale all running on Thursdays, Fridays, Sundays and Mondays.

That makes some trip lengths very easy to book. Nashville and New Orleans fly only on Thursdays and Sundays, which fits a Thursday-to-Sunday long weekend exactly. A five-day midweek Nashville trip would have to start on a Sunday and end on a Thursday. The Thursday-through-Monday pattern on the Florida and Las Vegas routes gives you a long weekend in either direction. Fort Myers is the strictest route. With flights only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, every trip runs either Wednesday to Saturday or Saturday to Wednesday, or covers a full week or more. The city's June release also lists departure windows. Orlando and Fort Myers leave McKinney in the morning, and Las Vegas leaves in the afternoon or early evening.

The launch offer has its own calendar too

Avelo's Sept. 24 announcement came with introductory one-way fares from $99, taxes included, plus a free first checked bag on DTX bookings. The fine print narrows that a lot. The $99 fare must be bought by Oct. 12, 2026, and only covers travel between Dec. 1 and Dec. 17, 2026, or between Jan. 7 and Jan. 31, 2027.

The gap between those two windows, Dec. 18 through Jan. 6, is the core holiday travel period, and it isn't covered. The free-bag offer has the same Oct. 12 purchase deadline but works differently: travel just has to be finished by Jan. 31, 2027, with no blackout in the middle. You also have to add the checked bag online to get the savings.

Combine the fare windows with the route table and the cheapest early trips get even more specific. Nashville and New Orleans start Dec. 17, the last day of the first fare window, so the $99 fare on those two routes mostly lands in January. Atlanta and Denver start a day earlier, on Dec. 16. The Florida routes and Las Vegas will have been flying for weeks by Dec. 1. That makes Thanksgiving week, with the holiday on Thursday, Nov. 26, the first holiday these routes will handle. It falls outside the $99 window, so those Thanksgiving flights won't qualify for the introductory fare.

What a trip from DTX costs before you board

Parking in the 980-space public lot costs $15 a day, paid through a contactless system, Carley said at the Sept. 24 event. The airport's own FlyDTX.com FAQ still says rates will be "determined soon," so the $15 figure from the press conference is the newer one. Since the route calendar pushes most trips into fixed shapes, you can estimate parking ahead of time. A Thursday-to-Sunday Nashville weekend spans four calendar days, and a Wednesday-to-Saturday Fort Myers trip does too. At the published daily rate, either one comes to roughly $60 in parking, depending on how the lot counts partial days.

Avelo pitches this as part of its model. Its release describes a strategy of using "smaller, less crowded airports in large metro areas," which it says brings "savings in parking and other costs." McKinney becomes one of the airline's bases, alongside Tweed-New Haven in Connecticut, Wilmington in Delaware, Lakeland in Florida and Concord-Padgett in North Carolina.

Timing the morning of your flight

At a four-gate terminal, the airline's counter hours matter more than the security line. Avelo's DTX page asks travelers to arrive at least 90 minutes before departure. Its ticket counters open about two hours before each flight and close 40 minutes before takeoff. Counters that open for each flight, not all day, fit an airport with only a handful of departures. Getting there extra early mostly means waiting for the counter to open.

A few details to have straight before you leave the house:

1. The address. Put 1910 FM 546 into your GPS, which is the terminal address the city gives. Avelo's destination page still lists 1508 Industrial Blvd.
2. The code. Commercial flights book under DTX, which is what shows up on boarding passes, bag tags and itinerary emails. TKI, the code the airport used for more than 40 years, stays in use for general aviation.
3. The rental car. Enterprise runs the on-site rental counter.

The terminal you'll walk into

Community Impact toured the building on Sept. 24 and photographed the check-in area, the gate area, the ramp and TSA baggage-screening equipment. The plan calls for centralized food and beverage concessions and open hold rooms. Officials were still finalizing vendors at the time of the tour, and none had been named. The terminal will have two murals by Texas-based artists, one at the curb and one in baggage claim.

The building is sized well beyond the first year's traffic. The $79 million terminal and related infrastructure took about 18 months from groundbreaking. It's expected to serve about 200,000 passengers in year one, against a design capacity of 1 million a year. Space for a fifth and sixth gate is already built into the design. The runway now runs 8,002 feet, and Taxiway C, which will link the commercial ramp to that runway, was still under construction in late September. At the same event, the FAA's Ignacio Flores presented the airport's operating certificate and noted that the last one awarded in Texas was more than 20 years ago.

Why the calendar will probably keep changing

The schedule in the table is the newest version, but it has already changed once. In June, Avelo announced five routes and two aircraft based in McKinney. By Sept. 24, before any flight had left, the airline had added Atlanta, Denver, Nashville and New Orleans and a third Boeing 737-800. CEO Andrew Levy said, "the bookings back that up." The airline's job estimate for its McKinney base grew to about 150.

More aircraft let an airline add more days on a route, but Avelo hasn't announced any frequency changes, and its fare terms say routes and schedules can change until a ticket is issued. For now, the schedule is what the table shows. Nashville flies Thursdays and Sundays, Fort Myers flies Wednesdays and Saturdays, and no flights leave McKinney on Tuesdays.

A hometown airport changes how a neighborhood works day to day, and that includes how buyers moving here for work weigh their travel time. If you're thinking about how DTX's arrival could affect your home's value or your next move, Cardinal Realty Group can walk you through it. Schedule a free consultation and get your instant home valuation.