I Took America’s Strangest Commercial Flight To The Middle Of Nowhere, Here’s Why It Exists

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