Order 03-02-5

Order 03-02-5

Essential Air Service at Massena, Ogdensburg and Watertown, New York

Order 03-02-5
OST-97-2842

Issued February 5, 2003
Served February 10, 2003

Order Selecting Carrier and Setting Subsidy Rate

Essential Air Service at Massena, Ogdensburg and Watertown, New York

After careful consideration of this matter, including all of the comments submitted in the docket, we have decided to select Air Midwest to continue to provide essential air service to Pittsburgh for Massena, Ogdensburg and Watertown, for an additional two years, in accordance with its Option 1. As set forth in Appendix A, service is to be provided with Beech 1900-D, 19-seat aircraft, at an annual subsidy of $1,288,021.

We are well aware of the strong support for service to Albany, as evidenced by the large number of comments received from elected officials, businesses, and residents in both Massena and Ogdensburg, all supporting the selection of Air Midwest’s service to the Albany airport. We are also aware of the MRSI study that concludes, among other things, that the majority of respondents are not using the local service and that businesses and institutions would be more likely to use the local air service if the destination hub were Albany instead of Pittsburgh. However, Massena and Ogdensburg’s situation must be viewed in the context of the core objectives of the EAS program, namely to subsidize air service for the most isolated communities and to ensure that travelers from those communities have access to the nation’s air transportation system. In this case, especially given that service to Albany would require either $714,000 or $1,000,000 in additional subsidy over the two-year contract period, depending on the option selected, we believe that Pittsburgh fully achieves those goals. According to the Official Airline Guide for the month of January 2003, Pittsburgh offers an average of 170 daily jet departures (not including regional jets) to domestic destinations all across the country. Albany, on the other hand, has an average of 31 daily jet departures (not including regional jets), most of which are to destinations on the East coast or Midwest. Including regional jets results in a total of 267 departures a day at Pittsburgh and 48 departures a day at Albany.

By: Read C. Van de Water