Dubuque? We don’t fly there anymore. Airlines say goodbye to regional airports
Callista Wessels, a college senior in Ithaca, N.Y., has been used to flying home to Seattle from the small airport in her university town. But flights in and out of Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport dropped to about 3,000 this year from 6,000 in 2019, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm — and prices have gone up so much that sometimes she takes a four-hour bus ride to New York City to take advantage of airfares that are hundreds of dollars cheaper. “There is definitely more of a barrier to getting home,” she said. An unexpected hangover of the pandemic has been the withered flight schedules at many regional airports. Of the 430 airports in the continental United States and Hawaii that offered commercial passenger service before the pandemic, 76 percent had fewer flights scheduled in 2022 than in 2019, according to the Regional Airline Association. Smaller airports lost “a dramatically higher percentage” of their flights than larger airports, Faye Malarkey Black, chief executive of the association, wrote in an email. Those airports lost an average of 34% of their flight traffic while larger airports’ schedules shrank an average of 16%. This September, American Airlines ceased flying to Ithaca and Islip’s MacArthur Airport in New York — as well as Toledo, Ohio, and Dubuque, Iowa — bringing the total number of airports where it has canceled service to 15. The airline says it has 100 regional jets parked because of a lack of pilots. United Airlines is ending flights to Lewisburg, W.Va.; Clarksburg, W.Va.; Weyers Cave, Va.; and West Paducah, Ky., this fall. Delta has not returned to 10 of the airports it left in May of 2020, including Flint, Mich., and Lincoln, Neb. For travelers who live near small-market airports, that can mean not only higher fares, but also inconvenient and infrequent scheduling, hours added to trips as they need to make new connections, or long drives to bigger airports that still have service.<br/>
https://portal.staralliance.com/cms/news/hot-topics/2022-11-24/general/dubuque-we-don2019t-fly-there-anymore-airlines-say-goodbye-to-regional-airports
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Dubuque? We don’t fly there anymore. Airlines say goodbye to regional airports
Callista Wessels, a college senior in Ithaca, N.Y., has been used to flying home to Seattle from the small airport in her university town. But flights in and out of Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport dropped to about 3,000 this year from 6,000 in 2019, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm — and prices have gone up so much that sometimes she takes a four-hour bus ride to New York City to take advantage of airfares that are hundreds of dollars cheaper. “There is definitely more of a barrier to getting home,” she said. An unexpected hangover of the pandemic has been the withered flight schedules at many regional airports. Of the 430 airports in the continental United States and Hawaii that offered commercial passenger service before the pandemic, 76 percent had fewer flights scheduled in 2022 than in 2019, according to the Regional Airline Association. Smaller airports lost “a dramatically higher percentage” of their flights than larger airports, Faye Malarkey Black, chief executive of the association, wrote in an email. Those airports lost an average of 34% of their flight traffic while larger airports’ schedules shrank an average of 16%. This September, American Airlines ceased flying to Ithaca and Islip’s MacArthur Airport in New York — as well as Toledo, Ohio, and Dubuque, Iowa — bringing the total number of airports where it has canceled service to 15. The airline says it has 100 regional jets parked because of a lack of pilots. United Airlines is ending flights to Lewisburg, W.Va.; Clarksburg, W.Va.; Weyers Cave, Va.; and West Paducah, Ky., this fall. Delta has not returned to 10 of the airports it left in May of 2020, including Flint, Mich., and Lincoln, Neb. For travelers who live near small-market airports, that can mean not only higher fares, but also inconvenient and infrequent scheduling, hours added to trips as they need to make new connections, or long drives to bigger airports that still have service.<br/>
