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
Devils Lake is a rare closed-basin lake. When lake levels naturally rise, there is no outlet. This became a problem about 15 years ago when lake levels rose high enough to flood some lakefront homes that were built in areas that had been built well above the average lake level.
As a result of the Devils Lake flooding, FEMA had to write new rules for flood insurance and disaster recovery related to closed-basin lakes, since it had literally never been a problem since that agency was founded in 1979.
The comments are more interesting than the article.
One of the things I love about this community! I learn a heck of a lot from the article comments.
Jamestown is home to Izumi, one of the best Japanese restaurants I’ve ever eaten in. Food, service, ambiance…who knew? This is why we road trip.
The title is a comma splice.
Fun facts: Jamestown is the ninth most populous city in North Dakota, and the bar in the KC Hall serves Grain Belt Nordest on draft. It’s also the home of the World’s Largest Buffalo (the world’s largest sandhill crane is just down I-94 in Steele, ND). Why do I know these things? My wife was born and raised in Jamestown. There’s a family reunion in Devils Lake next year, maybe we’ll get to fly on “The Devil’s Chariot”!
When Internet “influencers” take EAS flights just for the content, it helps subsidize the system. Your seat would have flown empty if you hadn’t contributed $99 to the cause.
I think towns with Amtrak service shouldn’t also be eligible for EAS. Devils Lake, ND is on the Empire Builder line which offers daily trips; it’s 8 hours from Devils Lake to Minneapolis/St. Paul (400 miles). Especially if Amtrak’s on-time performance improved to the 80% standard they target with long-distance routes. The US government is already providing a connection to the national transportation grid with Amtrak. Focusing on improving on-time performance would make the already-existing Amtrak service more useful to everyone along the route and then we could save the EAS funding. I’ll also point out that much of the on-time performance problem isn’t Amtrak’s fault; it’s the freight railroads that own the tracks. https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance
As you acknowledged, the US gives rail priority to freight, which means that the service cannot be reliably counted upon to be the lifeline for residents of smaller communities.
What if you lived in Devils Lake and had a sibling in Denver was in medical distress, would the additional 5-8 hours on a train matter?
Using these communities as the the impetus to launch HSR here is something that should be considered, especially given the value as a replacement to EAS flights. Linking these small towns that lack seismic activity, have low topographical variance, have large swaths of undeveloped relatively inexpensive land just makes sense.
US law actually requires that passenger rail be given priority, but since the freight railroads handle the dispatching the law is frequently ignored.
While the current EAS flight goes to Denver, that doesn’t mean it will always go to/from Denver. If Delta would pick up this EAS route the next time it’s up for bid, I’m guessing they would fly it in/out of MSP rather than Denver. The law only guarantees air service, it doesn’t dictate where to. So no matter what transportation mode you choose, there will always be scenarios where the options suck.
This YouTuber has something of a recurring theme of flying EAS routes. He once tried to fly across the country using only EAS flights (though he ultimately failed).
https://www.youtube.com/@noelphilips/search?query=essential
It’s always funny to me that Augusta, Maine get’s EAS service. On account you have two international airports with regular service to Logan about an hour either direction on 95. Augusta isn’t even rural, it’s an exurb of Portland now. Hell, two out of four are within an hour of a functioning airport. Hancock County- Bar Harbor in summer, which is not even on MDI. You get to Bangor International quicker then you could get to the square in Bar Harbor. And Knox County-Owl’s Head only takes over a bit over an hour because it’s Maine you aint got a straight path towards nothing. I’ve spent over a decade living within 20 miles of Augusta, and I’ve never heard a single person taking the Cape Air. Now, going about 20 miles down the Kennebec and taking the Amtrak to Boston to get to Logan is pretty common, probably because it cost 40 bucks.
I worked out in Maine for a summer, and I got the impression that driving an hour or more is considered really far to a lot of people out there…
This actually gets pretty interesting. Your traditional Mainer, the I’m living on land my family got by order of king in 1680 type. It would take an act of God for them to cross the town line. Except for the two life-time trips to Florida. I work with a person in their late 20’s. They’ve left the state for 14 days in their lifetime. The other Mainer, was born somewhere else. Has seen Phish in 38 states, and has spent at least six months thru-hiking some trail you’ve never heard of.
My in-laws are in their 70s. I believe they have left the state twice. Honeymoon and one Red Sox game.
Someone I used to work with once said to me “Oh, I went to London. Once”.
This in a town in Worcestershire that’s about a hundred miles, or three hours away from the capital, and there’s direct trains, coaches, or you can just drive.
Some people don’t seem to be interested in much outside their own head.
Admittedly this is part of the UK where I met elders who grew up in houses with no electricity or running water. WW2 was the first time they’d ever gone further than the nearest town, let alone the other side of the world.
About 10 years ago, I worked with a guy that grew up and commuted 35-45 miles to the very south end of Seattle, WA (but technically within the city limits). He had been into the downtown city center 3 times (all 3 for baseball games) by the time he was 26. Which is when he got on his first plane, and he worked in an industry directly supporting aerospace.
Some people just don’t deviate.
Maybe because it’s the state capitol?
Yeah, but we don’t like to actually acknowledge that. City is mainly known for having a large strip mall by the freeway that use to have one of three Chipolte’s and the only Olive Garden!
It is *exactly* because it’s the state capital that it gets EAS subsidized service.
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.
Do you have a good source for the amount that petroleum is subsidized? Every result I get is on Google is either AI slop, paid for by the oil industry, or just plain unscientific.
Fossil Fuel Industry Receives $35 Billion Each Year in Government Handouts, New Report Finds – Oil Change International
https://www.wired.com/story/us-taxpayers-will-pay-billions-in-new-fossil-fuel-subsidies-thanks-to-the-big-beautiful-bill/
Thanks!
Friend of mine often moves tanks with a heavy flatbed.
The govt just has better trucks.
A tank service truck can onload a tank at highway speeds.
The United Express CRJ200 is nicknamed “The Devils Chariot” by frequent fliers. Flying The Devils Chariot to Devils Lake feels apt.
I’m more concerned by what the pilots nickname the planes they fly. I can put up with whatever I’m sitting in as a passenger for a few hours.
Where in TX? I resided in Beaumont, TX for six years. Worst summertime climate I’ve ever experienced. And the wasps! I never got stung, but a guy that trimmed the palm trees I hired! I gave him a big tip for what he went through.
I was in Houston for the past 12 years (and Dallas and Waco before that) but I just escaped to Portland, OR. So the former refers both to where I was and my Jeep ownership at this point.
Welcome to the PNW! I live in Tacoma, but I don’t drive one. But I have owned its 4WD predecessor and a Tundra in the past.
Thanks. I think I need to retire (no pun intended) the summer tires on my Miata.
Yep! You get more ice storms down there than we do.
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)
Cool, a chance to fly in a Pilatus for only $99!
Right? But now I want to drive down to Portland just to fly in a Pilatus and not being flown to a better hospital. I knew a guy who flew one, out of Pendleton, for that exact reason.
He also changed the timing belt on my ’01 TDI.
Might be the same guy.
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.
The problem with the super small planes is a lack of pilots. This is partially due to an over-correction in 2013 of flight hours required for your ATP (Airline Tranport Pilot) from 250 hours to 1,500 following a crash with an under-trained crew. This has created a really high barrier to get into the industry and limited the number of new pilots entering the industry. Back in the old days you could build your hours relatively inexpensively once you got to be a “certified flight instructor” where you train private pilots – and this training has gotten expensive (ask Mercedes) and reduced the number of opportunities to earn your hours this way. It is going to become a problem soon.
Very much agreed. The Colgan Air crash was a wakeup call, but kind of like TSA being created due to 9/11 there was an awful lot of knee-jerk “we have to DO SOMETHING” overreaction. There is probably a happy medium between 1500hrs and the <200 that a new First Officer on a 737 or Airbus can have in much of the rest of the world – IMHO, a very major contributor to one of the 737 MAX crashes. I don’t have a pilot’s license, but thanks to having two commercial/instructor pilot uncles I have darned close to 20% of the hours logged that guy did that day (been flying with them since I was a kid)! It really is tough to get the hours, there just aren’t that many flying jobs that don’t involve hauling paying passengers around.
But something has got to give as all the aging pilots retire. Though if you can get in the door, it’s been a great time to be a commercial pilot the past few years – my neighbor’s kid has been flying for American for only 5-6 years and he has gone from flying the last of their turboprops his first year to F/O on A330s to Europe. That used to take DECADES to accomplish. Also a great time for military aviators who retire – another friend’s husband retired from the Navy and got snapped up instantly by SWA making big money.
My brother works for the company that has the medevac contract where he lives in Northern Canada. He was telling me how the new contract stipulates the aircraft used must be twin engined, pressurized, turboprops no more than 5-10 years old. The only twin, pressurized turboprops still in production are the King Air and the Piaggio P.180. I can’t speak for the P.180 but there’s a waitlist for new King Airs. It’s crazy how much consolidation there’s been in the industry, the last Saab 340 was built in 1999!
Saab 340 was the best. Loved these props.
I was a NWA frequent flier back in the day as well. They had flights like that on Saab 340s all over the place out of MSP. I would regularly be flying those Saabs all over creation, and some of the flights into the Dakotas and Montana/Wyoming had 3-4 stops. Regular “milk runs”. Long days considering I lived in Maine and would fly PWM-DTW-MSP then get on a Saab and hopscotch my way to various wide spots in soybean fields.
I installed point of sale systems in small rural hardware stores, and Hardware Hank, based in Minneapolis, was my company’s biggest client. But we also sold to Ace, DoItBest, Trustworthy, all the small indie hardware store brands. Been almost 19 years since I left that job, but I did it for almost a decade. Good times (or at least it was until I got an infinitely better job and figured out how much that job actually suuuuucked). Literally 3X the work for 1/3rd the pay.
I flew a lot back in the day. – Every week I was on a plane to go somewhere. Since I was based in northern Wisconsin, almost every trip began and ended on one of those Northwest Airlink turboprops.
For those 14 years I was on-the-go, I flew on over 2300 flights. Most of them were on Northwest. So I’ve probably been sitting in a Saab 340 wheels-up to wheels-down close to 1000 times.
My usual seat was 1C, and I got to know many of the flight attendants. It was kind of nice being greeted by name while I was boarding, either on my first flight of the week, or the last flight on my way home. 🙂
Yup – same here though being based in Portland it was DC-9s or RJ-85s to Detroit all the time until the miserable CRJs 200s took over post 9/11. But I flew many, many times on the Saabs too.
There were a group of us in Portland who were such regular Monday morning fliers that the gate agents dubbed us “The Breakfast Club”. 10 or so of us that were on the 8:45AM flight to Detroit almost every Monday for YEARS. In my case, normally three weeks a month nine months a year, then a bit less in the summer. The gate agents all knew us, and so did security and then TSA. Usually all of us would be in First too. For years I was on the 8:45 to Detroit, then the 3:45 arrival FROM Detroit on Friday. Week after week. The returns were not as consistent as we were all going various places for various lengths of time, of course. But in those days, there were only the multiple flights per day to Detroit, and a single flight per day to Minneapolis. 3.5hrs on a CRJ – nooooope. And in the spring that flight was severely weight limited. It was supposed to be an 8am departure, but quite often the 8:45 would be boarding and they would still be figuring out how to get 20+ people off the MSP flight for weight and balance because the jet stream decided to get extra frisky that day. That also made for some REALLY slow flights to Detroit on the slow-poke RJ85s and some absolutely ripping flights home to Portland though. Like 45 minutes takeoff to touchdown on a DC-9 instead of the nominal hour and a half.
A couple of the gate agents now work in other cities, and I still get recognized and recognize them! It’s such a nice surprise to get off an airplane and get a big hug from a very familiar face, LOL!
I was always in 1C on the CRJs. I don’t fit in the windows seats on those horrible things, and 1D had a hump in the floor for something. In those days NWA reserved the first row for assignment at check-in, so I would set an alarm so I would check-in exactly 24hrs before departure, and I managed to snag that seat about 95% of the time. I was sooo happy when AA ditched them all on the East Coast in favor of the 7s and 9s. I think the handful still flying as American Eagle are based in Chicago, and I avoid that place like the plague anyway. My travel is 90% up and down the eastern seaboard these days, and only about half as much as back in the day, though still plenty.
You’ll have to come to Australia and book a flight on Rex Airlines – they run the world’s largest fleet of SAAB 340s on regional routes under a similar government subsidised program.
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.
Next time you go through a metal detector, remember glass knives are older than metal ones.
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.
I hear Johnny Cash had been there for Pete’s sake.
Well, he HAS been everywhere, man.
$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.
Let’s say half of the program is waste (making up a high percentage). That’s $200 million a year, or the cost of 2 F35s. We currently have 600+ of those in the fleet with a plan to acquire THOUSANDS more. I agree waste ought to be minimized, however you’re not going to make much difference on programs that make up less than pixel-width of the pie chart of the federal budget.
100% this. Military spending makes up ~50% of discretionary spending in this country; I’m not saying we don’t need national security, or that EAS doesn’t involve a lot of waste, but for every $4 taxpayers of EAS spending, over $8,000 is being going to defense.
While it’s still accessible, I encourage folks to dig into https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov – it would be great if more taxpayers understood where those dollars go.
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.
There’s probably enough difference between West Texas and North Dakota to fit another set of stories.
Maybe something set up with multiple concurrent storylines going at once –
The locals, just trying to get by.
The oilmen, in for a quick buck or trying to support families elsewhere.
The corrupt elite, getting rich off of sucking the earth dry.
The prostitutes, who just see an opportunity to do better than survive (at least temporarily).
This would all play out against some harsh seasonal weather, as well as a time capsule of automobiles (and world events) that make viewers say “I remember that…”
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.
Hahaha, that is a good point. I never thought of it, but I’m sure there were mix ups.
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.
For sure, My wife and her family are from ND and I have been told Boomtowns are very cyclic there.
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.
Let’s put it this way… if it takes an hour to get to the airport in the *biggest* city in the country, I don’t think that people should get subsidized air service just so they don’t have to drive 90 minutes out in the sticks.
EAS should exist, yes, but not to two airports within a 90 minute drive.
Not everyone can drive.
Yeah, I live in a place where I don’t have to drive to the airport.
It is functionally impossible to go car-free in a place which has EAS support.
True, yet some people have to.
Airlines in Memphis became so predatory most people stopped flying, and bus service to airports over 100 miles away became a dedicated service, as it was cheaper.
Now profits are up, flights are down.
They have an entire empty section at the Memphis airport. They’re asking the govt to give them money to demolish it.
This is no longer a useful service.
People keep telling me to move out of the city because it’s “cheaper” in less-built-up places and then I hear anecdotes like this.
Memphis has over a million people, in spite of refugees from crime there.
The monopoly by airlines killed flying there, but similar events are happening everywhere.
It’s business as usual to drive customers off from successful business models now.
Though rural property is vulnerable to crime due to isolation, I am much safer than I was in the city.
I have effectively unlimited parking.
Deer wander through even at daytime and I can hear kids laughing a half mile away, when there are some around.
Since you no longer have property rights in American cities, and no real suppression of crime, I would never invest money in a city again.
Everything here is within a half hour drive or much farther, but I am near a large town, rather than in the middle of nowhere.
Really nowhere can be much cheaper or not.
Desert can be hundred an acre, but don’t expect mod cons.
Memphis has a violent crime rate of 2501.28 per 100k residents, New York has a violent crime rate of 765.28 per 100k residents.
Sorry that the facts don’t agree with your feelings.
You’ll have to explain that.
My experience with Memphis crime is real world events and their habit of under reporting crime is well documented.
Memphis machine politics and corruption was the historical inspiration for organized corruption in other cities, like NYC and Chicago.
Memphis is once again being investigated long term by the Dept of Justice.
I have reported to them my experiences.
You understand that I no longer live near Memphis?
My faith in the accuracy of crime records in any city, would be dubious at best.
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.
The USA cannot compete with other countries any longer due to the primitive state of data service.
I can see the city limits from my house, but grid service doesn’t reach here.
I’m wired by a specialty provider, probably subsidized, but I am on the edge of broadband availability.
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?
crazy enough, my very first flight as a kid I did indeed get the plastic wings. shame that they stopped doing that
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?