A dwindling number of air carriers serve remote towns with federal subsidies from the Essential Air Service, or EAS program. In Utah, they include Moab, Vernal and Cedar City. In May, two out of the three are set to lose their air service to Salt Lake City. It’s a game of musical chairs that isn’t set to end soon.
“Great Lakes basically abandoned us, a year ago. SkyWest didn’t come in until late in the spring, and they’re proposing to vanish again this spring, so that we’ve yet to have a year of really solid, scheduled service,” said Bob Greenberg, a member of the Moab Airport board.
SkyWest, based in St. George, is moving from turbo-props to jets. The Moab and Vernal airports can’t handle jets, and face an urgent need to upgrade their runways. Meanwhile, both towns are set to lose their Salt Lake service in May, in favor of daily Great Lakes flights to Denver. Greenberg said Moab basically had no choice.
“Denver’s a bigger airport. There are many, many more flights there. It’s easier to get to Denver from anywhere in the world than it is to Salt Lake,” Greenberg said. “Notwithstanding that, a lot of us travel to Salt Lake because it’s our state capital, because it’s really the closest big city, because we have ties there. So I think there’s quite a bit of disappointment in the switch from Salt Lake to Denver.”
While Moab opts for Denver to get bigger tourist enplanements, Vernal is happy because Denver is a better hub for the oil and gas industry. Both towns are planning to handle 50-seat jets in the future.
“Fifty is kind of a magic number because it’s the size of a bus tour. And so for the big commercial operators, they’d like to be able to bring in a busload of people,” Greenberg said. “I mean, there are several long-term trends. One is, visitation is climbing. You may have noticed the tremendous amount of hotel building going on right now.”
But even the 50-seat jets are set to vanish in the next few years, partially because they are getting old enough to need major overhauls. SkyWest, along with Republic, Delta and United, have begun replacing 50-seaters with 76-seaters. Greenberg notes that the turbo-props are set to vanish altogether.
“Most of the other twin-engine turbo-props, the Brazilias, are now being flown by foreign militaries. You know, if you want to get a Brazilia ride, go talk to the Argentine air force.”
According to a report last year by the General Accounting Office, the trend for all air service is fewer flights and fewer planes, but especially at small and medium-sized airports. Greenberg said Moab will easily buck this trend, whether or not subsidies continue.
“With the numbers SkyWest was showing, I think there’s every hope that the level of guarantee and subsidy could be drastically reduced in, say the next five years,” Greenberg said.
The elephant in the room for airlines big and small is the pilot shortage, expected to get worse before it gets better. Five years ago congress enacted higher training requirements, which reduced the pool of pilots. Now it takes $100,000 worth of flight training to get an entry-level job, which at Great Lakes starts at $14,000 a year, the lowest in the industry.
In the last two years, the GAO says 27 American airports have lost service altogether. Great Lakes has abandoned 17 cities since July, including Telluride.
