Thanks, Taxpayers, for My Subsidized Ticket on an Airplane Gutted to Meet Stupid Regulations

Beechcraft 1900DUsually, when I fly into Los Angeles, I
take a shuttle bus to Phoenix and catch a plane out of Sky Harbor
Airport. This time, though, I caught a commuter flight out of tiny
Ernest A. Love Field in Prescott. I caught that plane with three
other people. Thank you, taxpayers, for subsidizing our jaunt as
part of the often (and justly) criticized
Essential Air Service program
. The problems with that
boondoggle, which is withering away none too soon, are well
demonstrated by the fact that half the seats had been ripped out of
the plane to skate by FAA regulations, and we still rattled around
in the damned thing.

Prescott’s wonderfully bare-bones Ernest A. Love Field offers
commercial service to LAX courtesy of Great Lakes Airlines. OK,
it’s really courtesy of American taxpayers, who
underwrite the operation to the tune of $2,094,235
(PDF) per
year.

I’d add the technical detail that the service is offered on
19-seat Beechcraft 1900D turboprop planes, except that when we
boarded, the plane was gutted. Ten of the seats had been ripped
out.

“It’s because of me,” the pilot told a fellow passenger who
asked about the very interesting configuration, though he meant the
company’s pilots in general. “The FAA revised pilot qualifications
last year for 19 seat planes. So now we only operate them with nine
seats.”

In fact, Great Lakes illustrates
the change on its website
(PDF) as…well…a feature. A
wonderfully inexplicable feature.

Beechcraft 1900D

This change has been noticed elsewhere. Blogger Brett Snyder,
also known as CrankyFlier,
writes
, “Just about every airline in the US operates under 14
CFR Part 121. That’s part of the code of federal regulations.
You’ll commonly hear it referred to as just Part 121. Any airline
operating under Part 121 is subject to those new pilot rules
requiring each hired pilot to have 1,500 hours of flying (with a
few exceptions).”

But there’s a shortage of pilots who meet the
increased requirements
. So Snyder speculates (and my pilot
confirmed) that small airlines are moving to satisfy the looser
requirements that apply to Part 135 operations, with planes of
fewer than 10 seats. They do this by flying the same planes they
did before, but with more than half the seats ripped
out
.

Adds Snyder:

isn’t that insane to run a 19-seat airplane with only 9 seats?
In the normal world, yes. That would mean your costs are going to
be much higher on a per-seat basis. But we’re not in the normal
world. We’re in Essential Air Service world. And in Essential Air
Service world, airlines are lucky to get 9 people in those 19 seats
on a good day.

Lucky…like the four people, including myself, who were on my
plane—with the costs largely covered by taxpayers.

For what it’s worth, Snyder sees no safety issue in the scheme,
since the same pilots who were safely flying 19-seat planes are now
operating the nine-seaters. It’s just an end-run around red
tape.

In 2006, the
New York Times
noted that the Essential Air Service
“program has come to seem mostly expensive and, to its critics,
unessential.” The same article noted that, in the United States,
the plane on which I flew is entirely a creature of subsidized
routes. “No one I’m aware of has figured out how to operate the
1900 outside the Essential Air Service program,” said the head of
Mesa Air, another regional operator.

Unlike many criticisms of boondoggles, this one has had some
impact. No new communities can join the subsidized program as of
2010, and starting last year, existing operations under the program
have to maintain an average of ten passengers per day (Kingman,
Arizona, is being booted
after achieving just 2.7 passengers
per day, along with other low-traffic communities).

To judge by my flight, Prescott’s taxpayer-subsidized air travel
days are numbered. And well they should be. But thanks, taxpayers,
for that very educational trip.

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