THANK YOU ED

This past week the Regional Airline Association gathered CEOs, subject matter experts, folks from Capitol Hill, and journalists for the 2022 RAA Leaders Conference. Ed Bastien, Delta's CEO spoke in Minneapolis. Swelbar-Zhong published the 10th update to its US Regional Market Watch.

Finally a US network carrier CEO said what needed to be said and in no uncertain terms. First Bastien said: “America's travel industry is changing, and it may mean Minnesotans who used to fly out of smaller airports may now need to drive to a bigger one”.

Bastien went on: "For some markets, we're gonna need to make choices as to whether we're gonna fly a larger flight, whether we're gonna consolidate the number of operations, but you're never again gonna see the 50-seat aircraft have the level of prominence in the industry... I think we have less than 20 that we're flying today. When DL merged with NW in 2009, collectively we had about 1,200 aircraft as a company; 500 of those were 50 seat or smaller aircraft. That's down to almost nothing now today.“

For much of my career, advocating for air service on behalf of small communities has been a portion of my work. Earlier this year, we published 2 studies: The Real Third Rail Issue with a subtitle of Continuing to Believe That Pilot Training Requirements Will Get Changed OR That There is Some Other Airline/Aircraft Fix to the Conundrum.

The second Real Third Rail Issue was subtitled: Believing that only one silver bullet fix is needed to preserve small community air service. [Think Dubuque forming a committee to reinvigorate small jet service in the U.S.] In the second piece, we showed the economics of small jet service being upside down well before the pilot rates negotiated over the past month.

In the second Third Rail piece, some said we had certain numbers wrong and inflated in order to make the case. The fact is we used the data that the regional carriers filed with the DOT. We knew they were wrong so we deflated what the carriers filed.

Over the past 2 months, we have been studying the ULCC sector of the business. Just like with the regional sector, data to baseline the importance of their presence to smaller airports will likely become necessary for those on Capitol Hill. Our plan is to publish a U.S. ULCC Market Watch with updates going forward.

Why? Because headline data is just wrong. Adding up the numbers of route cancellations by one carrier or another is part of the answer. But its analytical integrity should be questioned. While AA may have made a decision to stop serving Islip, Newburgh, and Toledo -- either ULCC service or Southwest service remain.

When AA left Ithaca, Delta remains. Only Dubuque and Williamsport are without service after AA made the decision to withdraw its service.

Smaller airport service will no longer be the sole domain of the regional airlines. Connectivity will be less of a measurement. Having commercial service at all will be the success.

#swelbar