Tuesday's article in USA Today about how Salem, OR, (city population: 150,000; metro population: 400,000) was getting regular passenger air service after a long absence) got me to wonderilng: what are other good-sized North American cities do not have scheduled air service? (No whining about too few flights; let's save that for a future question.)
2007-03-01 00:27:18 · 2 answers · asked by Willster 5 in Travel ➔ Air Travel
The government actually has a program called EAS - Essential Air Service. If an area is not being served by any commercial flights, the government actually pays an airline all its operating costs to go into that area. I know there are a few of these in northern michigan (Escanaba, Iron Mountain) these are sparsely populated areas where no airline could make a profit flying there.
I am suprised some place as large as Salem would not have commercial flights. There must be enough other large airports nearby that it did not seem worth it.
2007-03-01 04:43:24 · answer #1 · answered by apuleuis 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Salem is only about 50 miles from PDX, Portland International Airport. You can drive from Salem to PDX about as quickly as you can get from Manhattan to JFK. There's also commercial air service at Eugene, which is about 60 miles south. While Salem is a separate city from those two places, pretty much the whole Willamette Valley is one metropolitan area.
There are many other cities without air service, but almost all of them are also quite near other airports.
2007-03-02 08:02:20 · answer #2 · answered by dmb 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋