Samoa and Arkansas Win Federal Air Travel Subsidies
The Department of Transportation has now released the 2009 Small Community Air Service Development Program (SCASDP) awards that we discussed here last year, so how'd they do? Well, I agree with some and not with others. But unlike with the 2008 SCASDP awards, I actually picked one winner correctly. That one, a small Samoan airport, and a consortium of small Arkansas airports lead my list of the best picks by the DOT. I'll touch on my least favorite picks tomorrow.
The SCASDP is meant to provide grants to help airports build up commercial air service and reduce fare levels for local passengers. Historically, most of these grants have gone toward funding marketing campaigns or guaranteeing revenue if an airline chooses to fly to the airport, but there have been some more creative ones out there. This program is a far superior one to the Essential Air Service (EAS) program which just dumps money down a black hole in order to subsidize little-used routes.
This year, there were 84 grant applications and only 19 were chosen as winners. Of those 19, plenty of them look similar to other past applications. Some will work and others won't, but we don't need to talk about all of them here. Let's just talk about a couple that really stood out for me.
The first one is an obvious one, because it's the only one in the last two years that I've highlighted positively that has actually won. The little Manu'a Islands in American Samoa were awarded $169,000 for something that seems incredibly basic. I told the sad tale of the Manu'a Islands last year, and I'm genuinely happy to see them get the award. What is it they want? They just want to buy some ground power equipment.
These islands have very little going for them, but they're trying to reverse their fortunes by turning to tourism, eco-tourism, to be specific. But they're having trouble getting regular air service. Part of that is because there just isn't much demand yet, but the other problem is that costs are high. Since there is no ground equipment at the airport, airplanes have to keep one prop spinning when they land and that uses precious fuel - up to $125 worth. Give them ground power, and they can keep costs down. Hopefully then they can support more service.
The other proposal that stood out among the winners is that of Eldorado, Harrison, and Jonesboro in Arkansas. Those communities are jointly the lucky recipients of $150,000. What will they do with this money? Spend it on marketing.
I think I'm a sucker for these kinds of awards, but they really do make sense to me. These communities are EAS communities, so they can't support air service on their own. But even the EAS program has its limits, and these guys are afraid that they may lose service entirely if they don't get things together.
The last EAS carrier to serve the markets pulled out on June 30, 2008. A week later, the DOT picked Great Lakes Aviation (GLUX) to take over, but by April 2009, they still hadn't started. So the DOT asked for proposals again. On July 9, 2009, they chose SeaPort Airlines to give it a shot. While previous service had focused on Dallas, SeaPort took to the skies in October 2009 heading east to Memphis instead.
So for those keeping score, that's nearly a year and a half without air service and now it's heading the opposite direction (east). During that time, the people in the communities learned to drive elsewhere. Now that service is back, they need to tell people about it and get them to start considering flying locally again. If not, they may lose their air service for good.
Like I said, tomorrow, we'll talk about my least favorite grant winners.
[Photo credit: Marshman]