October 6, 2006
Subsidies Keep Airlines Flying to Small Towns
PUEBLO, Colo. — Hoping for an empty seat beside you on your next flight? No problem — just schedule a trip to someplace like Kingman, Ariz.; Brookings, S.D.; or Pueblo.
They are among more than 100 locales around the country that receive federally subsidized airline service, and the average number of passengers on each flight is about three.
Most of these flights on 19-seat prop planes have plenty of elbow room — a rare luxury in this age of jampacked commercial jets. Some major airlines have cut their fleets about 20 percent since 2001 and have abandoned unprofitable routes, meaning planes are flying fuller than at any time since World War II.
Over time, though, the program has come to seem mostly expensive and, to its critics, unessential.
Mike Boyd, a consultant to airports, said truly remote routes — those in Alaska, northern Maine, parts of the Western states — should be retained. But he said that most routes should be eliminated.
“The Essential Air Service program is one of those well-meaning federal programs that often results in money wasted on trying to recreate those wonderful days of the 1950’s,” Mr. Boyd said in a recent note to clients. “Somebody needs to tell Congress that Ozzie and Harriet are gone.”
From Lewistown, Mont., Jerry Moline, the airport manager, is used to driving 110 miles to shop at the Wal-Mart in Great Falls.
Likewise, most of his neighbors drive 125 miles to the airport in Billings, which has jet service, rather than fly there on the subsidized 19-seaters. The Lewistown flights attracted fewer than three people a day in 2005; each passenger’s one-way ticket
was subsidized with $472.78 paid by taxpayers.
The emptier the subsidized flights, it seems, the more cherished the program became. Members of Congress regularly pressured the Transportation Department to continue subsidies to towns they represented. A lobbying group sprang up solely to fight to preserve and expand the program.
Colorado Springs Airport, offering nonstop jet service to 14 major cities, is about 40 miles away. Denver’s huge hub is within about 110 miles. In fiscal 2005 Pueblo’s two daily subsidized flights to Denver drew a combined five passengers a day.
“That may be generous,” confided Jerry Brienza, manager of the Pueblo Memorial Airport. “We were close to three a day last year.” The government calculated the one-way subsidy at $255.06 a passenger.
Traffic has picked up to about eight a day in 2006, Mr. Brienza said.
Excluding Alaska, where many air routes are subsidized, the Transportation Department paid out about $74 for each one-way passenger in the program in fiscal 2005. That is more than Amtrak’s famously large per passenger subsidy, which is $19 to $52, depending on how it is calculated.
Without the subsidies, most of the roughly 100 1900’s remaining today in the United States could be idled, said Jonathan Ornstein, chief executive of Mesa Air, which once operated 122 of the planes and has cut its fleet to 20.
“We don’t make money in the program; we do it because we have the equipment” and owe more than $1 million on each of the planes, Mr. Ornstein said. Mesa, with annual revenue of more than $1 billion, mostly operates jets now. “No one I’m aware of has figured out how to operate the 1900 outside the Essential Air Service program.”
Should be sufficient and legally-safe 
