At 9:07 A.M. on June 9, 2025, I walked along the side of North Dakota Highway 19, energy drink in hand. Cars raced by, probably wondering what I was doing.
When I was younger, one of my favorite YouTube creators said something in a video that always stuck with me: that, to be successful on the internet, you have to bring something to the table that no one has brought before. I could sit in my room and make videos about topics that interest me, but instead, I actually go out and experience them first, recording lots of footage along the way.
That’s what led me to the town of Devils Lake. (No, I’m not missing an apostrophe; they just spell it like that for whatever reason.) Reaching the small town was no simple feat. On Sunday evening, I took a flight on Sun Country Airlines from Houston, where I live, to Minneapolis, then caught the bus down to St. Paul Union Depot in time for the overnight Amtrak train, which makes a stop in Devils Lake around 7 A.M. each day.
Nearly every flight run by United Airlines or its regional subsidiaries goes through one of its nine hub airports. But last summer, while researching for an unrelated video, I zoomed in enough to see that there was one very peculiar exception: A direct flight from Devils Lake to Jamestown, North Dakota, another small town about 91 miles south. A commercial flight between the two least busy airports in one of America’s most rural states makes no economic sense on the surface.
Enter the Essential Air Service. The federal government, by awarding contracts to airlines, subsidizes flights to a handful of airports that are far enough away from a major airport and in towns small enough that scheduled commercial service would not otherwise be profitable. So much of the subsidy is aimed at remote Alaska towns that you have to wonder why that’s not a separate program entirely. But if there was ever a perfectly qualified town in the lower 48, Devils Lake would be it.
[Mercedes note: Before the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the U.S. government controlled what airlines could enter the market, where those airlines could fly to, and what fares they could charge. After airlines were deregulated, the government feared that the airlines would abandon the small towns that they were forced to serve in the past. The Essential Air Service guarantees that if a small town had air service before 1978, it could continue to have access to the National Air Transportation System now. Basically, EAS guarantees that at least some of America’s rural residents can still fly. EAS is also used for rapid medical transportation.
The program also usually costs the federal government around $400 million annually, which isn’t much compared to the rest of the federal budget. – MS]
From Devils Lake To Jamestown
The 7,000-strong population is so small that there were no Uber drivers, which forced me to walk to the airport. The town lies a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Hector “International” Airport in Fargo, itself still a small regional airport, and the nearest major hub, Minneapolis, is a six-hour drive away.
Now, the Department of Transportation generally requires that airlines serve each town individually, meaning flying a plane back and forth between the town and a major hub airport. But despite only a couple of uses nationwide, exceptions and loopholes do exist, this being one of them,
Jamestown Regional Airport is also subsidized by the EAS, and this is where more context on the airline side is important. When airlines like United fly to smaller cities, they aren’t actually operating the flights but are instead contracting with a smaller airline that flies smaller aircraft under the parent company’s brand name, United’s being United Express.
But even these “smaller” aircraft are still quite large compared to a decade or two ago. The smallest turboprop aircraft, such as those manufactured by Saab, Cessna, and Fairchild, are no longer operated by any private US airline, the last of them having been retired in 2013. These planes were classified as commuter aircraft and seated between 15 and 40 passengers. For context, the smallest jet now in service by a private US airline, the Bombardier CRJ, has 50 seats.
Planes are simply getting bigger, even though these EAS towns are not. Naturally, that’s led to an uptick in complaints that the service is wasteful spending, as the newer Embraer and CRJ planes are more expensive to operate and don’t fill all the seats.
[Mercedes note: Some of these Embraers and Bombardiers have cabins with fewer rows of seats than they would normally have when flying a more normal route, and the airlines often still can’t fill the planes on an EAS route. – MS]
Maybe, then, this intra-North Dakota flight starts to seem more viable. The Department of Transportation doesn’t set a strict number of flights; the contracts are fairly negotiable and malleable, especially when two EAS airports are so close together. From 2014 onward, Skywest (as United Express) ran “triangle routes” from Denver that stopped in Devils Lake, then Jamestown, or the other way around, before returning.
The tag team allowed Skywest to fulfill its requirements while seemingly operating with slightly better margins. But you’re left to wonder why they even sell tickets between the two towns, or who that’s for. I bought my ticket as part of the connecting itinerary, flying to Jamestown and then on to Denver.
There were 10 passengers that day, but shockingly, two of them disembarked at Jamestown; the flight to Denver was almost full. There was also a direct flight from Devils Lake to Denver (which had first stopped in Jamestown) later that evening, and I suspect that most travelers from Devils Lake would have just waited for that one.
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The evidence points to that being the case: I had to scramble to take this flight because Skywest announced in May that it would be canceled after June 24. Instead, there would be 12 trips a day from both Jamestown and Devils Lake to Denver, cutting out the triangle route. The DOT reevaluates Essential Air Service eligibility every year, and likely deemed the route to be high-demand enough to warrant additional money for direct flights; either that, or Skywest did so. It was likely the former, as SkyWest has a history of trying to end service to small towns, only for the DOT to force them into continuing it.
Does The EAS Still Make Sense?
The EAS has its fair share of criticisms, but while some are surface-level, others require some digging. For one, the program often seems to be a recipient of pork barrel spending. You’ll notice on the map below that the most populous states are sorely underrepresented in the program. My home state, Texas, has one subsidized airport; it lies fairly close to Houston and San Antonio, while vast swaths of rural west Texas have no viable airport.
Meanwhile, small states reign supreme. Maine has four EAS airports; Kansas has five; Montana and Nebraska have seven. Senators from these smaller states are more incentivized to work this subsidy into appropriations bills because they simply affect more of their electorate. A senator from Texas or Florida wouldn’t lose reelection over such a small funding tug-of-war, but a senator from a smaller state is naturally at the mercy of these local interests more.
The method in which the DOT awards contracts probably deserves more scrutiny, too. At least five of those seven Montana airports receive their lone service from Cape Air, which only operates small 8-10 seat Cessna and Tecnam aircraft. A fair amount of the airports on the list fall into that category.
Augusta, Maine, with its population around 19,000, receives 27 weekly flights on commuter aircraft with nine seats, for a total of 243 weekly seats. Devils Lake, with its dozen weekly flights on 50-seat jets, sees 600 weekly seats to Denver despite having a population 60% smaller than Augusta.
While demand is not uniform, the similar populations of EAS towns mean there can’t be that much variance; the subsidized airports are generally in towns of between 5,000 and 25,000 people. Another airline, Contour, flies Embraer 135 jets with 30 seats, so there is a middle ground, but the whole program could use an audit. Flying the larger 50-seat jets is more expensive for the airline, the government, and the consumer, given the universally higher fares on these routes.
In April, I flew on one of those Contour flights, which I dubbed “America’s second weirdest flight” (after the North Dakota one). The flight, from Beckley to Parkersburg, was also a triangle route, as it continued on back to Beckley, then to Charlotte, then to Beckley again, and so on.
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Perhaps part of the answer lies in these routes that I took, which appear to be the only two of their kind in the program. It’s a curious case as to why they’re limited, because they considerably improve the economics for both the government and the airline, especially when it comes to the 30- or 50-seat jets that are almost never even close to full on the direct routes.
Additionally, many of the EAS towns are quite close to each other, like Jamestown and Devils Lake. It seems ludicrous, for example, that the Kansas towns of Salina and Liberal both see daily CRJ service straight to Denver, when the demand is certainly not there to fill both flights independently.
[Mercedes note: One thing to keep in mind is that, while EAS coverage is spotty, it still connects small rural communities by air that would otherwise not have any airline service at all. Giving people more options for travel is a net positive in my book. – MS]
I’m not going to pretend to know the depths of how these decisions get made, but what I do enjoy is experiencing them as a traveler, since it gives me the insight to make a more thorough analysis. Even if that means an uncomfortable flight, a night on a train, and a 3-mile walk to the airport after eating a McDonald’s hashbrown.
Top graphic images: Beck Hassen; Jamestown Regional Airport
TBF, the US government subsidizes the petroleum industry by far more than $400M so that people could drive mostly empty seven seat trucks around everywhere. But hey, national security! You never know when your local militia will call you up to tow a tank…
More seriously, these flights are often critical for people accessing medical treatment. It’s a big deal.
The United Express CRJ200 is nicknamed “The Devils Chariot” by frequent fliers. Flying The Devils Chariot to Devils Lake feels apt.
Man, and I thought the miserable puddle-jumpers into Longview/Gregg County were small. This is a whole ‘nother realm of small.
See also: Hells Angels. Not sure how many Hells they posit.
all of them
Our local news had a story about this recently talking about the EAS flights from Pendleton, OR to Portland. There are 3 round trip flights to Portland per day flown by “Boutique Air” on an 8 seat Pilatus PC-12 single engine turboprop.
The basic question was “why is the federal government subsidizing air travel on a route that Greyhound doesn’t even cover anymore. “ It is a 3 hour drive on I-84
EDIT ($99 each way)
I had some deja vu for a moment then realized I follow your IG account and had seen this already! Glad to see you’re on Autopian for the more in depth write-ups!
Back in the Northwest Airlines days, I used to regularly hop a flight on a Northwest Airlink (Mesaba Airlines) (Saab 340 B or B+) that either came from Minneapolis (MSP) to Rhinelander, WI (RHI) and then on to Escanaba, MI (ESC) to Pellston, MI (PLN) to Detroit, MI (DTW) or the return flight from DTW to PLN to ESC to RHI and then on to MSP.
Those were fun days. I loved the Saab 340s. Especially the two that were painted up in the Mesaba route paint schemes. The Mesaba flight crew were the best!
https://imgproc.airliners.net/photos/airliners/0/6/1/1085160.jpg?v=v40
And those flights and small, cheap to operate planes filled such a nice niche. These days it’s nearly impossible to conveniently get to Rhinelander because they don’t do any of these point to point milk run flights anymore. I used to fly from Milwaukee to Flint on Midwest express on a turboprop because it was so much more efficient to get to Novi instead of flying to Detroit. Ironically, it’s this kind of stuff that countries like Norway are looking into with electric planes to stitch together sparsely populated geography, but in the US all the electric planes will probably just be shuttling tech bros around NY and Silicon Valley.
Curious how much that ticket cost, because DL to Denver to Jamestown (the way it is now) is no less than $250 one-way.
Fargo itself is a decent airport in that at least there’s direct flights for the major airlines to hubs, but aside from Delta, United, and AA, there’s usually a rotating list of smaller, generally trash airlines that do like three flights a week in/out or have a very specific destination list. Alligiant and Frontier now, they used to get Spirit, too. Expensive as all get-out, though. A lot of people from Fargo will drive to MSP to get wherever they’re going… though that’s largely because they’d rather spend 4 hours driving and another hour parking than pay the extra $100 to bounce through Minneapolis or Denver or O’Hare.
Currently they have 5(!) gates and can technically service 747s. For some bizarro reason they’re expanding the terminal to nine gates now, and added a huge parking garage.
Still better than the train service to Fargo, though.
I used to fly in and out of McCook, NE now and then, also an EAS airport. Even after 9/11, the TSA “security” was the same guy or gal that took your paper ticket and checked in your luggage, and all they had was an old school metal detector.
There was only one flight a day from there to Denver (maybe two, I forget), and it left at stupid early o-clock, which meant I had to get there at an even stupider hour. One time the plane was late getting in, so the security/ticket/conceirge/suprised-he-wasn’t-also-the-pilot agent went into town to buy everybody breakfast at McDonalds.
Apropos of not much, this reminds me of the time that I got a speeding ticket on I-94, just west of Jamestown. It was early 1998, and I was headed for Minot to do some Dodge Intrepid/Chrysler Concorde launch training while driving what was probably the only 1998 Intrepid in the entire state. My radar detector suddenly lit up, letting me know about the ticket that I was about to receive from an ND Highway Patrol officer who was headed the other way. He wrote me for my actual speed with no discount: 83 in a 65. The ticket was only $17! It galled me to know that if I were about 250 miles west of there, I would be in Montana which had no daytime speed limit at that time.
$400M worth of positive? That’s $4 per taxpayer; just because it’s a small amount in relation to the total Federal budget doesn’t mean it should be wasted with little more than a shrug. That said, we’re nearing the next iteration of Rand Paul’s Festivus report on wasteful government spending, and I’m sure there will be more egregious examples of our tax dollars “at work”.
The thing that gets me about those “reports” is that all some staffer does is look for program titles that are mockable by conservatives, but do no actual research into what those programs are, or if they actually are “wasteful spending” or just a program that needs to be explained in context. My dumb senator (Lankford) (actually, BOTH of my senators are dumb, but the other one is too lazy and busy picking fights to actually put out reports (or answer the damn phone)) does that same thing with equally vacuous results. Pretty sure they would have decried the basic research funding for things like the internet as wasteful, too.
People know it’s stupid pork spending, but no one has enough authority to stop the infinite number of little wasteful projects nor does anyone care enough to try.
Even our editor here knows it’s crap, trying to justify it at just a tiny part of the waste.
It’s funny reading the comment below about being the only one on the flight. I lived in North Dakota for a few years when shale oil was booming (and the rest of the world’s economy was crashing). All of the flights in/out of the central and western part of the state were massively overbooked. There were signs on the entrace doors to the airport telling passengers they should talk to an agent about accepting a voucher for a later flight.
It was a crazy experience. Outside of city limits there were people living in mobile homes, RVs, shanties, and shipping containers stacked on roadsides. The oil towns were like the old west. 90% men and soooo much prostitution.
That would make an interesting book, and then a screenplay.
Don’t they already have that with Landman? What a soap opera.
I remember driving past a man camp in Williston ND and all the trailers on the gravel clearing were all identical and I wondered how the drunk guys knew which was theirs after bar close.
And then the global world prices went down so all the drilling stopped and now it’s just the like three people per rig that are necessary to run the fracking equipment (if they were even running that.)
Good ol’ boomtowns.
Midland/Odessa get like this during the booms too.
As someone that owns rural property, I’m not against Federal subsidies for rural communities in general (I think subsidies for rural broadband, to say nothing of the decades ago REA, are worthwhile). But the subsidies described in this article (and the linked one, which was even more eye opening) make little sense. Driving 2.5 hours to a largish airport is not a hardship – it’s one of the trade offs of rural life, and spending $400M is probably a waste of taxpayer money (it would be better spent on broadband, or clean water, or something EVERYONE in the rural community needs on a daily basis). Plus there’s the pointed out disparity that northern communities (with air service prior to 1978) get subsidies, while huge, far more remote sections of the country that probably really do need a closer airport are ineligible.
I definitely do appreciate the article from this new author however.
I would expect some of it is tied to business development (functional airports make it easy to get companies to come in and setup manufacturing, for example), but that might not be the case. As you said, 2.5 hours (while not convenient) isn’t crazy – we sometimes do it for international direct flights rather than booking an indirect from the airport 15 minutes away because it ultimately saves time and money. And also as you said, there’s a lot of open spaces on that map that have to be further than that from an airport.
Well said.
Short-haul airline service is quite expensive per passenger with so few passengers. However, a subsidy for a bus service to many of these smaller communities with road connections would likely be more cost-effective a solution as it would decrease the cost of travel for those who can’t drive, and benefit a larger swath of the local population.
Wasteful? Probably, but could be reformed rather than gotten rid of. Some things are going to be wasteful for the common good aren’t to turn a profit, but provide a service for the community. $400m is a lot of money but not compared to what our gov’t really does waste. I would certainly say that while a lot of the aircraft that make more sense for these routes have been phased out, that seems to have been a business decision by the profit driven carriers. It would seem there’s a niche- both for manufacturers and companies- to provide either a new aircraft that fits the bill or rehabbing/refurbishing existing older airframes that don’t cost as much to operate on these routes (it’s not like we don’t see old airframes in service well past what was thought to be an operational life- tons of old passenger airframes converted to cargo use are operating at 40 or 50 years old).
As an owner of rural property itself, I saw waste with the government on the broadband side of things. I had been looking at Starlink (grudgingly) and its startup costs were essentially $700.00 to me. Instead, I heard about a local co-op and got fiber optic to my property for an insanely low price, only to see that the cost was as low as it was due to a $22k federal grant. While I took part, I did so realizing full well that they could’ve given 30 families internet for the same price of giving only me internet.
If you find yourself on the other side of a big wet bit this one might be fun although getting there to try it out would take a lot of trains, planes and thingys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westray_to_Papa_Westray_flight
I suspect that someone here would rather like the planes, just a bit.
I’ve flown plenty of EAS flights when I was setting up my business, it’s always so fun being the only dude on the flight and it’s especially fun when you’re on a cape air EAS flight and the pilot makes you sit up front in the cockpit.
Did they give you a pair of little plastic wings to pin on your shirt?
I have a fear of flying after a bad experience as a teen, I don’t know if being up there would be better or worse?