About That $500 Flight…

I was moving in some old posts and I decided to reflect on a post I wrote on travel chaos. I bemoaned that I wanted to fly to my alma mata which is a 1 hour flight from Chicago but round trips cost $600 round trip. It’s actually $500 and the $600 was from Dallas¹, but still that’s really expensive! I was angrier still at the fact that this flight is considered “essential air service” [VIDEO: 12:02] so why the fuck isn’t it cheap?

After reading through the essential air service Wikipedia page, I saw that American Airlines was paid $3,986,989 a year to fly between Waterloo and Chicago. Looking at the cited attatched document [PDF 265KB], I noticed that the subsidy was to provide 50 seats on 13 round trip flights a week. Doing a bit of math, that comes out to roughly $60 a seat which differs from their quoted $99 which accounts for the load factor. So for each flight, they get around $3,000 to connect middle-Iowans to America and the rest of the world, which isn’t a bad deal. I did some bad math earlier and I thought it was $3,000 a passanger at which point I was furious.

Adding their average fare of $89 with their $99 makes the flight $178 each way minimum or $356 round trip. This was $486 which is $130 more and to be charitable I’ll assume that’s the “carrier imposed charges” and taxes so I guess they aren’t really robbing the taxpayers though the fare is above the quoted average still. Air Choice One which targets essential air service routes, also competed for this route (along with Minneanapolis) and would require ~$150 a passenger. While CRJs suck, Caravans suck more, especially for a fat ass like me. Though they had a fancy pitch deck [PDF 5.2MB], I think not having interline agreements, local support as well as suspiciously charging customers a quarter of the subsidy hurt it’s chances.

I didn’t expect to go down this rabbit hole and miss bed time, but here I am!