Every year, people around the country pay their taxes and begin to complain about which government programs are necessary and which are not. And every year the same question comes up: why does the government shell out millions of dollars in federal aid to airlines in order to fly — in some cases empty aircraft — to cities nobody has ever heard of? Because it’s essential. History of EAS Essential Air Service has played an interesting role in this country…
Sun Country, a Minneapolis/St. Paul-based ultra-low-cost carrier which operates a fleet of Boeing 737-800s, has begun the process of applying for more Essential Air Service (EAS) contracts. Roughly a year ago, the carrier took the aviation community by surprise winning its first EAS contract in the Wisconsin community of Eau…
Essential Air Service (EAS) is truly a hot issue with EAS routes changing more in the past year than they have in the past five, with airlines requesting to terminate service left and right. The top EAS carriers have also shifted, with Contour and Southern Airways Express slowly growing in…
Back in late April of 2023, Delta's wholly-owned subsidiary Endeavor Air retired its last CRJ-200 and sent the aircraft off with joyous fanfare at the regional carrier's bases with parties in Atlanta, Detroit, and Minneapolis. This made SkyWest the final operator of Delta Connection branded CRJ-200 service in the airline's…
Hawthorne, California-based airline Advanced Airlines has just been awarded its third Essential Air Service contract. While three may not seem like a lot compared to the mass number of contracts that carriers like SkyWest have, it is still growth for an airline that only a few years ago had only…
Denver-based Denver Air Connection, or more commonly known as DAC, will be expanding from its Minneapolis/St. Paul hub, which is due to a contract refresh. Pierre, S.D., an EAS community the airline has served since June 2021 when SkyWest terminated their contract here, along with nearby Watertown, S.D., which have…
Roughly one year ago, in March of 2022, SkyWest requested to terminate 29 Essential Air Service communities around the United States. We are now a year later and a lot has changed, and it is not the only airline that has requested to terminate EAS communities as fellow commuter airlines…
Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines has once again updated its ever-changing flight schedule for some of the small communities it operates to in the Midwestern U.S. While most of the communities do lose their tag flights and go back to their original nonstop flights, some still do retain them but change…
Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines has made it through the pandemic without starting a single tag route. Other airlines such as United, American, Alaska, and others combined destinations into a single flight to save costs during the pandemic due to severely light passenger loads. SkyWest under the United Express banner combined…
SkyWest has had a rough couple of months, they requested to end 31 EAS contracts in the spring of 2022 and have combined about a dozen other communities into tag flights. It is seen in the industry that when one airline has its troubles, other airlines will step in and…
