AIR FAIR

There may be good reason for the government to help some small airports stay open, but that assistance should not be detrimental to regional airports. Rather than expanding the Essential Air Service program, as proposed, Congress should rethink the program and target funds to truly distant airports that support substantial traffic without taking passengers away from increasingly important regional airports.

Essential Air Service was started by Congress in 1978, as part of the airline industry deregulation, to ensure that travelers in small cities had access to air travel. It provides subsidies to 115 small airports at a cost of about $110 million a year.

Last year, Presque Isle received $1.1 million in subsidy. The other three qualified Maine airports – Rockland, Bar Harbor and Augusta – each received only slightly less, $1.06 million.

In 2003, the law was changed to require communities within 100 miles of a hub airport to pay a 10 percent share in order to obtain their subsidy. The provision, which would have affected the airports in Rockland, Bar Harbor and Augusta, has never been put into effect. Recently, Sens. Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and others introduced legislation to eliminate this cost-sharing provision.

Such a differentiation between airports that receive the federal subsidy may make sense and should be part of the discussion later this year when Congress takes up the reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration.

A recent report by the New England Airport Coalition found that midsized airports, such as Bangor’s, play an important role in connecting local residents to the national flight network while easing congestion at Boston’s Logan Airport. Subsidizing airports in Augusta and Rutland, Vt., so passengers can fly to Boston while bypassing Bangor and Burlington, prevents these airports from being able to add flights, perhaps to new destinations, giving passengers greater access to the national airline system. But this would help regional economies because businesses and new residents would have better connections to the rest of the country and world. It could also ease congestion at Logan, an airport so crowded that local leaders considered building a second airport in the 1990s.

According to an analysis last year by The New York Times, many of the airports covered by Essential Air Service average only a handful of passengers a day, costing taxpayers up to $677 in subsidies per one-way ticket. The airport in Pueblo, Colo., for example, averages just five passengers a day. Area residents have likely concluded that it makes more sense to drive 40 miles to Colorado Springs where they can connect to flights across the country rather than flying from Pueblo to Denver before connecting.

The airport in Presque Isle, however, attracts an average of 53 passengers a day, at a subsidy of $34 per one-way ticket, according to the Times. Travelers have reasonably concluded that flying from Presque Isle is more efficient than driving to Bangor, a distance of 163 miles.

Supporting small airports that demonstrably serve a need makes sense. Financing those that unnecessarily undercut regional airports, which play an increasingly important economic and transportation role, does not.