The long-awaited return of passenger air service to the Four Corners Regional Airport remains locked in a holding pattern, according to airport manager Mike Lewis, but he remains optimistic that a carrier will choose to add flights to and from Farmington sooner rather than later.
During a lengthy presentation he delivered to members of the Farmington City Council on Feb. 27, Lewis outlined the issues the Four Corners Regional Airport faces as he and other city officials continue to try to lure a carrier back to town. The airport has been without passenger air service since December 2017, when Great Lakes Airlines, a small regional company, ceased operations.
“I could conceivably think that we could get a call just about any time,” Lewis told the council, responding to a question about when passenger air service might return.
While introducing Lewis, City Manager Rob Mayes said bringing back a passenger air carrier to Farmington is something city officials have worked on tirelessly for many years.
“There is no issue we have focused on more in my entire tenure here,” he said.
Mayes said Farmington citizens ask him and other officials when passenger air service will return to the city more than any other question. With that thought in mind, he said Lewis would be making the rounds of local organizations over the next several weeks, duplicating the presentation he delivered to the council on Tuesday.
Farmington’s inability to land a carrier has nothing to do with lack of demand, Lewis said, pointing to market studies that show plenty of folks would take advantage of such a service here if it were offered.
The problem, according to the airlines, continues to be a lack of pilots, Lewis said, though he acknowledged the pilots union disputes that assessment and argues the problem is that the airlines simply don’t pay well enough.
“Growth and expansion by all carriers continues to be stymied by a pilot shortage,” Lewis said.
He cited a report by TIME Magazine indicating the airline industry needs to hire an average of 14,500 new pilots each year until 2030 to catch up with the deficit. He also quoted an ABC News story that showed America only produces 5,000 to 7,000 pilots a year.
A pilot shortage already existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, Lewis said, but the outbreak and the impact it had on the airline industry, when the number of people traveling plummeted, made things much worse, leading to 6,000 pilots taking early retirement.
Lewis then pointed to an estimate by the Regional Airline Association, an advocacy group that represents 17 North American regional carriers, that approximately one half of all current pilots will retire in the next 15 years.
That means small and large airports across the country are suffering, he said.
“We’re not being picked on by the size of the city,” Lewis said, referring to a table in his presentation that shows 59 airports across the country have been dropped by American Airlines, Delta Airlines or United Airlines since 2020.
The airports on that list include many of those in the intermountain West, including Flagstaff, Arizona; Grand Junction, Colorado; and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The list also includes airports in larger markets, including Oakland; Duluth, Minnesota; Toledo, Ohio, Dubuque, Iowa; and Ithaca, New York.
Even the less-recognizable names on that list represent a much larger potential customer base than Farmington, Lewis noted. Toledo has nearly 717,000 residents living within a 25-mile radius, while 173,000 people live within 25 miles of Dubuque and 169,000 folks live within that radius in Ithaca.
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By contrast, only 92,000 people live within 25 miles of Farmington, he said.
That hasn’t stopped the city from coming close to landing a replacement carrier in the past. Lewis said city officials reached a verbal agreement with SkyWest Airlines in June 2020 to resume passenger air service at Four Corners Regional Airport, with an Oct. 15, 2020, start date established.
But by the middle of summer that year, Lewis said, U.S. air traffic had flatlined because of the pandemic, and the service was postponed indefinitely.
Since Great Lakes Airlines left Farmington in 2017, Four Corners Regional Airport has undergone several million dollars in improvements designed to make it more attractive to regional carriers, Lewis said, including new taxiways and terminal building renovations.
Lewis said he, Mayor Nate Duckett, Mayes and/or consultant Gary Foss continue to meet on a weekly basis with airline executives to make sure the Four Corners Regional Airport remains on their radar.
“We’re working diligently to try to continue to keep our idea of Farmington air service in front of the major carriers,” he said.
Lewis said there are signs the pilot shortage issues are beginning to ease, as the major carriers announced last week they were adding approximately 8% more flights this summer as demand escalates and air travel in the U.S. approaches near capacity.
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“It’s just going to be a matter of time as to when somebody decides that the time is right, that there’s enough pilots, enough aircraft to be able to take a look at re-serving Farmington,” he said. “We’ve demonstrated to them that the market’s healthy. It’s just them having the equipment and the capacity to expand into us, our market.”
Passenger air service was introduced at the Four Corners Regional Airport in 1947 when Monarch Airways began offering flights to and from Farmington, according to Lewis. Service reached its zenith in 1983 when there were 38 departures offered each day by six airlines.
Mike Easterling can be reached at 505-564-4610 or [email protected]. Support local journalism with a digital subscription: http://bit.ly/2I6TU0e.
This article originally appeared on Farmington Daily Times: Farmington airport seeks air service, still hampered by pilot shortage
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