24 Small Towns May Lose Air Service
by JOE SHARKEY
Monday July 18, 2011
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...
For the full article go to:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/24-Small-Towns-May-Lose-Air-nytimes-3674165086.html?x=0&;.v=
For the list of the 24 cities which are being dropped, go to:
http://news.delta.com/index.php?s=18&;item=156
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