Passenger traffic at Burbank Bob Hope Airport improved 5.2 percent in March. The airport served 337,432 passengers, up from 320,787 passengers in March 2014. It is the second straight month the San Fernando Valley’s only commercial airport has seen an increase, after passenger traffic fell in January. Contributing to the increase was Southwest Airlines, which has cut flights at the airport, but is filling its remaining flights with higher passenger counts. It transported 253,017 passengers, up 5.5 percent, or more than 13,000 from a year earlier. Alaska Airways was up 7.7 percent to 34,206 passengers. SeaPort Airlines, a commuter airline serving small airports in Southern California and the Central Valley, increased its passenger count to 1,556, a more than 500 percent increase from a year earlier after adding service to San Diego. US Airways experienced the biggest drop, falling 18.9 percent to 13,743 passengers. Delta Airlines was off 8.7 percent to 6,830 passengers. Bob Hope Airport has struggled in the past few years as flight traffic and passenger counts dwindled amid the recession, and as carriers consolidated operations at larger airports to keep planes full. A subsidiary of Thousand Oaks’ Teledyne Technologies Inc. received a contract on Friday valued up to $67 million from the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command. Teledyne Brown Engineering Inc., in Huntsville, Ala., will provide live-fire test and evaluation, flight and ground-test data collection, and missile integration and flight testing for missile-defense weapon systems. The contract has a value of up to $67.4 million over the next three to four years. Shares closed down $2.58, or about 2.5 percent, to $102.39 on the New York Stock Exchange.
