Presque Isle airport cancels Portland flights

PRESQUE ISLE – Local residents who need to get to Portland quickly now have to fly to Boston and backtrack to the southern Maine city or take a long car ride, because today is the last day that Portland flights will originate out of Presque Isle.

Colgan Air cited low rider numbers as the main reason for pulling the two-flight per-day schedule.

“We were only averaging about three people per flight,” Scott Wardwell, Northern Maine Regional Airport manager, said Thursday. “On a 19-seat aircraft, that isn’t anywhere near close to being self-sustainable.”

Wardwell said the airport would need about nine to 10 people on each flight to maintain the service.

“This was a trial period to see if the market was there,” he said. “But there weren’t enough people using it to justify continuing it.”

Wardwell said the service to Portland has been tried twice before and for various reasons has not worked out.

“We’re committed to trying new things and felt that it was a good time to see if market conditions had changed to warrant a flight to Portland, but all parties involved, the stakeholders if you will, felt that the market simply wasn’t there,” he said.

The direct air service was implemented Oct. 6 with $500,000 in funding from the Department of Transportation’s small community air service initiative, as well as $25,000 each from the Maine Department of Transportation, the Portland Jetport, Northern Maine Development Commission and the city of Presque Isle.

The service was started on a six-month trial basis, Wardwell said, but interested parties including the city, the DOT and Colgan Air, which hosts flights out of Presque Isle, decided to cut the trial period short and use the leftover funding to promote the airport’s Presque Isle to Boston flight service.

The airport still will have three flights to Boston a day during the week and two flights each on Saturday and Sunday.

“The reason why we’re interested in marketing that service is to build ridership for the Saab 340,” Wardwell said.

The airport is averaging 1,200 to 1,300 passengers per month on the planes, which each have 34 seats.

“We’ll focus on building our Presque Isle to Boston market and hopefully putting us in a better position to add a fourth flight during the week,” the airport manager said. “Really, what we’ve got to do is build the ridership for our existing service. We’ve got to get more folks taking it.”