24 Small Towns May Lose Air Service

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

Rural America, already struggling to recover from the recession and the flight of its young people, is about to take another blow: the loss of its airline service.

That was underscored last week when Delta Air Lines announced that it “can no longer afford” to continue service at 24 small airports. The carrier says it is losing a total of $14 million a year on flights from places like Thief River Falls, a city of 8,600 in northwest Minnesota that fills only 12 percent of the seats, or Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, where Delta’s two daily flights are on average less than half full.

Nationally, all major airlines have been reducing and sometimes eliminating flights altogether in small cities, as the industry concentrates much of its service in 29 major hubs, which now account for 70 percent of all passenger traffic, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Delta’s announcement was especially acute because the airline operates in most of the small airports that receive a total of almost $200 million in federal subsidies to maintain air service under the Essential Air Service program. The subsidies are scheduled to expire in 2013 unless revived by Congress. Delta acquired many of those small-city markets in the Midwest when it merged with Northwest Airlines.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/business/economy/24-small-towns-may-lose-airline-service.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

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I remember an interview on the Thom Hartmann show where he pointed out that if the Postal Service were defunded, FedEx wouldn't want to deliver in rural USA.

[stevebreeze]

1. it's the magic of the marketplace. some get stinkin rich other get cast aside.

[Downwinder]

2. The benefits of deregulation.

[Paka]

3. The rest of the world does understand...

you can't fly to every small market in this age of low demand and high petrol prices. The answer is high speed rail connections to the hubs. Problem is Americans are so averse to rail transport they won't support it. It costs very little more to fly a full airplane over an empty one. Just what makes air service to every place in the world you might want to go essential. :think:

[FLPanhandle]

11. You got it.

Also, not flying into every small town would reduce air traffic congestion and airport crowds.

The government would have been better off not subsidizing the airlines and spending the money on trains/rail systems.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

19. How is high speed rail even conceivably the answer?

Given the communities in question can not support a single flight, presumably in the smallest airplane operated by the airline - yet could justify spending hundreds of millions, if not billions to connect them to high speed rail?

[kestrel91316]

4. A lot of those small markets also don't have bus or train, so it's personal cars

or nothing.

[Tunkamerica]

7. My brother lives in Dayton and their Amtrak station was closed a while ago.

[ladjf]

10. ... or, smaller planes. nt

[Bandit]

12. I bet a few have horses.

:shrug:

[kestrel91316]

13. Oh, that's real helpful, particularly for the folks in, say, Baker Nevada.......

[Psephos]

5. Lucky bastards. n/t

[Beartracks]

6. Do we need a "public option" airline?

Back in the 1930s and 40s, I think it was, rural America wasn't being served by the electric utility companies because, frankly, it was too expensive for them -- there was no profit in expanding transmission systems to get the electricity out to the farms and small towns. Thus the Rural Electric Administration was created to bring electricity to these area, and other government agencies were tasked with getting affordable power out to the people as the hydropower projects began to get underway. In essence, government programs stepped in to do what private interests wouldn't or couldn't do. The benefits of electrification in this country far, far outweighed any funding costs. But even then, much of that cost would've been returned to the government anyway, through taxes stemming from increased economic activity, or from revenues paid by electric customers. Sure, capitalism in general is a good foundation for an economy, but sometimes it seems that PUBLIC capital can get the job done better than private capital. Come to think of it, I've read that public power availability in this country serves to keep ALL electricity more affordable, much like a public option would've done in the health insurance industry.

So, anyhow, I was just wondering, if the private airlines can't reap boffo profits on the rural routes, maybe we need a "public option" to fill in the service gap?

=================

[no_hypocrisy]

8. And yet you have Schumer pressing for Jet Blue to use a Long Island airport.

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/business&id=8257278

There are three major NYC metropolitan airports and more airports like McArthur and Newburgh, NY are being developed to accept commercial traffic. I'm not certain if Teterboro (NJ) is also being considered for commercial airlines.

[tanyev]

9. Bring back the trains!

[LisaM]

14. Northwest was so much better than Delta

They claimed the merger would make no difference; what a crock.

[bigworld]

15. Two daily flights half full?

Umm, cut it back to one daily flight.

[BigDemVoter]

16. Aren't South Dakota and Alabama Republican states?

And some of their small communities are losing air service, and they want MORE spending from the Feds? Hmmm. Sorry, but something smells funny here. I certainly don't object to the spending, but I find it interesting that Red states don't mind spending as long as it's on THEM.

[24601]

20. Re-read the NYT story. It was not the states or towns calling

for the subsidies. It was the Airline.

[BigDemVoter]

21. Noted--

Thanks for the correction. I need to reread it!

[du_grad]

17. Delta pulled out of Toledo this spring

...and we're a far larger metro area than these little towns. Toledo Express Airport is dying a slow death due to being close to Detroit Metro. You can drive up there in a little less than an hour and there are hardly any flights going out of Toledo any more.

I can foresee the day when the airlines will pull out of all cities of <1,000,000 inhabitants. :-(

http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2011/02/delta-air-lines-drops-toledo/144259/1

[hakko936]

18. My guess...

..is that most of these small airports are within 75 miles of other airports that will maintain service.

For those banging the one flight a day drum, think it through. One flight a day means that a plane is going to sit there for a long time waiting to leave. That costs the company money too. You have a plane, flight crew, ground crew, and airport personnel sitting around all day waiting. That is not very wise use of resources.