Essential Air Service at DuBois, Pennsylvania

Order 2006-6-31
OST-2004-17617

Issued June 26, 2006 | Served June 20, 2006

Order Selecting Carrier and Establishing Subsidy Rate

After carefully considering the various issues involved and the community's comments, we have decided to select Air Midwest (Option 1) to provide EAS at DuBois for a two‑year period. The carrier's proposed service and subsidy levels are reasonable, and the carrier's service at its other subsidized communities continues to be satisfactory.

The case boils down to selecting a single proposal from among the three individual proposals offered, while considering a number of competing factors and alternatives, including the community's preference for a particular carrier and service option, the level and type of service offered by each carrier, the code-share arrangements each carrier has with its major-carrier partner, and the relative subsidy requirements of each proposal. Based on the letter from the Authority's Chairman, the community clearly prefers the re-selection of Air Midwest with its US Airways Express code-share service to the Pittsburgh hub. In fact, the letter from the Authority does not even mention the proposal offered by Regions. As the relative subsidy requirement of Regions' proposal is greater than Air Midwest's Option I, and it received no community support, we will not select Regions to provide EAS at DuBois. We are left then to choose either Air Midwest's Option 1 proposal (18 round trips per week) or its Option 2 proposal, which offers an additional Pittsburgh round trip each weekday (23 per week) for an additional annual subsidy of almost $300,000.

We note that the number of passengers using Air Midwest's service at DuBois has increased steadily over the last three years. Specifically passenger traffic has increased from 15,183 total passengers in 2003, to 18,780 in 2004, and to 20,210 in 2005.

By: Michael Reynolds