Small Communities Are Losing Air Service. It’s Not All Bad News.

Background: A lot of small airports have seen scheduled airline service discontinued. But in most cases, it is actually the result of the evolution of communication channels. That means communities now need to clearly understand the future effects – and opportunities – these changes represent. Resistance is futile. New approaches are imperative.

Loss of scheduled airline service.

Small and rural communities have been experiencing it for the past 30 years. It is not a mirage. It is not a temporary situation. It is a fact that airports at a number of small communities have lost scheduled airline flights.

It is also a fact that with the evolution of airline economics, the changing value of air transportation as a communication channel has changed.

With the expansion of digital modalities, this is not a trend that will be reversed. Point: this is just part of a tectonic shift in how Americans communicate. It is not a situation that can revert to the 1980s. Resistance is futile. What is now imperative is the accommodation and optimization of the communication modalities that have made a lot of air service obsolete.

Communication channels have shifted, and their relative economic viability has changed as well.

The shrinkage in small community air service is part of this, regardless of how many desperate consultant studies are done, or how many local citizen air service task forces are engaged. Or how many obsolete and useless federal programs to resuscitate air service are implemented.

Face it: air travel is no longer the fastest or most efficient channel to move information and data between humans. In the last 40 years, this is probably the most unnoticed logistical trend in history, even though we are today living in very different social, business and commercial environments.

This evolution has taken place in every communication channel. It just seems that when it comes to air service access programs for small and rural communities, the narrative is to ignore it. From the perspective of local civics, that is understandable. But civic leaders have the responsibility to recognize the future.

So, let’s review the overall changes in how people in the USA communicate.

The Headlines Delivered to The Doorstep. Anybody remember the importance of the “morning paper?” At one time, it was a communication channel most relied upon to reveal what was going on in the world. Got it right at the front doorstep.

How about Walter Cronkite at 6PM on television? Or the Huntley-Brinkley team? Folks couldn’t wait to hear what they were going to report. Along with newspapers, a few TV networks – contained in small time-limited segments -were prime communication portals to tell us what was going on in the world.

For more in-depth information there were weekly magazines such as Time and Newsweek.

Today, these channels of communication have been entirely replaced as first-access sources of data and information. By the time the morning newspaper arrives, consumers already have knowledge of whatever important information might be printed above and below the fold.

As for electronic news, the plethora of flows such as websites, instant notification, cable and satellite have rendered the network 6PM shows to be mostly recaps of what the viewer already knows.

Time and Newsweek? Essentially not in the game, for all intents.

Air Transportation Also Has a Different Role. Airports Need to Tumble to It. Okay. Let’s take a look at another communication channel: air transportation.

Until the mid-1980s, across America there were a score or so of independent “regional” airlines, each with their own turf and geographical route systems, boarding passengers at lots of small rural airports. They had their own identities, their own ticket stock, their own reservations systems, and their own route networks which they defended from one another. Business traffic – not leisure trips – was the foundational bedrock of their revenues.

These were airlines like Cascade and Wings West and Gem State and maybe half a dozen more on the West Coast. Then we had others like Britt Airways, Simmons, Midstate, Precision, ASA, Trans-Colorado and more.

They operated small 15-seat to 30-seat turboprop airplanes on routes like Shreveport to New Orleans, or Albany to Boston, or Abilene to Austin, and hundreds more. They also connected small community airports to major airline hubs, facilitated by interline agreements that allowed connections with virtually all of the airlines operating there. For example, when a Bar Harbor Airlines flight arrived at Boston, it connected passengers to a dozen other airlines.

Today, these airlines and the air transportation system they represented are essentially gone. Starting in the mid-1980s, these “regionals” tended to be subsumed into specific major carrier systems, and eventually they became what they are today: companies that merely lease airplanes and crews to major airlines. Just a part of the fleet. The independent route systems are gone. The intra-regional flights are gone, too.

At the same time, however, emerging new communication modalities actually eliminated a lot of the air traffic that these “regionals” once was generated to and from small and rural communities. Add in the skyrocketing costs of airline operations, and the results are what we have today.

The Most Important Metric Is Speed. The point here is that like the morning paper and the 6PM first-information television news, this sector of the air transportation system was once live, robust, and had strong consumer demand. But now, the financial and market value underpinnings that supported this sector are gone.

Today, the throngs of business passengers flying between places like Albany and Islip in the early ‘80s are gone. The documents and information they were transporting between the Capital and the county seats at Riverhead and Mineola no longer need to be physically delivered.

Spending a whole day doing a business roundtrip from Hartford to New York – a major commuter route back then – is today not only inefficient but more and more unnecessary.

Short-haul business markets have atrophied because there are faster and more efficient modes of moving the data and information that air passengers once transported.

Then there are pressures of raw economics. The escalating costs of moving small units of capacity – 15-seat to 50-seat turboprops – have now eliminated any chance of providing flights in thin market routes. These airliners and the economics they represented are gone for good.

Wake Up & Smell the Opportunities in The New Environment. The real “solutions” for future economic growth in rural America are found in focusing on how to capitalize on the new communication channels and technologies that have made local air service untenable. The silly canard that every rural airport needs scheduled air service has only diverted local economic planning and resources from analyzing the future and instead wallowing in the past.

The success of small community commerce and business are no longer dependent on whether people can physically fly to the local airport. Actually, that’s positive.

Instead, the main determinant is whether the region has the infrastructure to support recruitment of new investment. Quality of life, regulatory issues, cost of living, and incentive programs for new investment are the future in regard to building local economies. Local air service is great, but more and more often air service can be accessed at other airports where the drive time is likely less than consumers in Nassau County Long Island need to allocate to get to LaGuardia Airport.

Regionalization of economic development is the name of the game.

This is not to say that research regarding potential air transportation options should not be accomplished. But when facts are known, another study won’t change them.

This is the future for rural America: capitalize on the dynamics that have marginalized or killed of traditional communication channels. They represent the future.

The downside is for communities to continue to fight it, instead of embracing new economic development programs that accommodate it.

Again, resistance is futile.