Will Air Service Ever Fly Here?

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

T he question still gets asked rather wistfully from time to time around these parts: Will regularly scheduled commercial airline passenger service ever return to Moore County?

The best available answer appears to be: Don't rule it out. But don't be planning any vacations around it, either.

We were flying high there for a while - a very short while, as it turned out. Delta Air Lines provided scheduled service in and out of the Moore County Airport for only a little more than a year. It ended in November 2007, as the economy was heading into a tailspin and the airlines went into a spasm of cutbacks and consolidation.

Delta Subsidies Left a Bad Taste

As it now stands, things are locked in a kind of impasse. No airline is likely to come here unless doing so can be made profitable. But as things now stand, the only way that might work is for the county to subsidize the provision of air service in various ways, which current county officials seem dead-set against doing.

And no wonder. The county provided various kinds of subsidies, direct and indirect, to Delta last time around. And the general feeling is that the county ended up taking a bath. In the words of John Taws, of the Moore County Airport Authority, "There's no denying that most carriers approach an airport with a hand out to a certain extent, looking for revenue guarantees. And that's not palatable to us."

Nor should it be. Budgets are too tight all the way around to get back into that losing game.

Airline service here is not going to be attractive enough to work unless it's a regional carrier with multiple flights in and out - not necessarily every day, but at least on the busiest flying days. And fares will have to be competitive, or most people will continue to drive to Raleigh or Charlotte, pay a relatively modest parking fee, and take advantage of more reasonable fares and much more variety in terms of schedules and destinations.

Improvements Still Make Sense

If there's any hope, it might lie with smaller planes and more frequent flights than have been the case in the past. The downside of that is that many travelers are less comfortable with smaller planes. The upside, besides the general convenience of being able to fly out of one's home county, is that anytime there are fewer than 30 passengers, you don't have to go through a TSA checkpoint - though you would still have to pass through one upon arrival in Raleigh or Charlotte.

The bottom line may be that regular passenger service anytime soon is simply not in the cards for a community with a population this relatively small, even though the presence of major recreational facilities here obviously generates far more in-and-out traffic than in most communities of comparable size. This will certainly become dramatically evident with the back-to-back U.S. Opens coming in 2014. But that burst in activity will clearly be the exception rather than the rule.

Meanwhile, it is good to see all the activity being carried out and planned to extend runways and improve passenger waiting areas. Modern, attractive airport facilities are still a major draw for air service, whether scheduled or not. And you never can tell - a miracle may yet happen.

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JimRussell44 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Let's look at the numbers: Fayetteville Regional Airport is 48 miles from the Moore County Airport and would take about an hour (maybe less) to drive. Raleigh/Durham International Airport is 70 miles and would take about an hour and 15 minutes to drive. Charlotte Douglas Airport is 103 miles and would take about 2 hours and 15 minutes to drive. Given that you have to be at the airport at least an hour prior to departure, it would be quicker to drive to either Fayetteville or Raleigh and would be about the same amount of time to drive or fly to Charlotte. The big difference, of course, is that it would be much cheaper to drive, even if only one passenger is considered. The real progress that needs to be made for the area, as well as for the entire country, is economical, reliable and speedy ground transportation. Imagine if we were smart enough to build an elevated, high speed monorail system that connected all the major cities in this country and had local spurs from the nearest big city serving the smaller local communities. Elevated means their are no "crossings", high speed means they could compete with airlines on many routs, economical means than most of us could afford it. For those requiring luxury accommodations, the monorail cars could be divided into "classes" and could include sleeping and dining accommodations. To me, a better idea that spending tax money to up-grade a local airport that would benefit an elite few. The monorail system would open up Moore County to a lot more people than just wealthy golfers.

Matt_Woodruff 3 months, 3 weeks ago

The dynamics of commuter air service changed forever when the airlines ditched turboprops for jets. The fuel burn plus the cost of fuel make short flights in jets cost prohibitive. Blame that on the flying public, they didn't like the Twin Otters, Beech 99's and Shorts 360's :-)

DaveyNC 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Attaboy, JimRussell, upholding the liberal tradition of wanting to spend literally trillions of dollars for relatively few people. Repeat after me: in order for intercity, high speed rail to be feasible, a high population density is required. New York has such a density. Boston, Philadelphia and even Washington DC have it. Atlanta and Dallas and Houston and nearly every other major city don't have enough density. Their populations are spread over much greater areas. I used to live in an Atlanta suburb, Alpharetta. A high speed station would likely use the existing infrastructure in downtown Atlanta. So I would have the option to drive ~35-40 miles into downtown Atlanta, in Atlanta traffic or just head north on I-85 to get to Charlotte. I could be halfway to Charlotte by the time I make it onto the train and not have to rent a car when I get to Charlotte. Easy choice.

Europe has much greater population density and they developed around trains. It made sense. The US has wide open spaces and other than the Northeast corridor, we don't have sufficient density. We built roads and cars instead. One result of that is that we have been the dominant economy in the world for going on 100 years.

I know you guys are just dying for us to be like Europe, which is fine. You seem to be winning that battle, for now. I mean, we have higher unemployment than we used to and it will stay that way maybe permanently, just like Europe. They're Balkanized and the result has been multiple major wars, we are politically Balkanized, so we got that going for us. Their energy prices are high, got it. While they have big economies, they're not exactly innovative. Can you name a European company with the reputation for innovation to match Apple? Or Microsoft? Anything over there that equals Silicon Valley? These things didn't happen in the US by accident. Our rough and tumble brand of society produces out-sized winners, not the incremental, plodding companies that come out of Europe.

But hey, let's all be like Europe and sit in sidewalk cafes, smoking stinky little cigarettes and write pretentious poetry. Like Pelosi said, now that we have health care we can quit our jobs to be poets.

alladat1 3 months, 3 weeks ago

davey NC - now I know why they call you guys Wingnuts.

JimRussell44 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Davy, old boy, I'm not going to convince you of anything so long as your long range thinking goes no further than the end of your nose. In the scenario I proposed, the high speed monorail comes into a station in downtown Atlanta. You access it by boarding your local low speed monorail in Alpharetta, which is a large metropolitan area that would have several stops, one of which would be convenient to where you lived. Upon arrival in Charlotte, you take public transportation to your destination. Maybe it's the local monorail system that takes you up to Lake Norman or down to Rock Hill, SC. Maybe all you need to do is use their existing uptown rail system. But, as is the case in the gun debate, it's all or nothing with you guys. A high speed monorail system is just the first step in the sinister plan to take your cars from you so "the man" can control where and when you go anywhere. And the brainless paranoia marches on.

DaveyNC 3 months, 3 weeks ago

As it happens Jim, the Alpharetta to downtown Atlanta leg can almost happen right now. MARTA almost reaches Alpharetta now. This might shave 10 minutes off the drive during non-rush hours. No idea how long in rush hour, but it doesn't matter because that multi-million dollar rail spur hasn't reduced traffic one little bit. And the last I heard, MARTA continues to lose money.

The rap on MARTA has always been that it doesn't really go where people want to go, although I believe that problem has eased with the liberal showering of money at the problem over the decades. The reason, though, that it got that rap in the first place is that the routes were determined politically. Not surprisingly, the politicians laid it out so that they could buy some votes, too. It hampered MARTA for many years.

Following in that tradition, Jim, you have laid out a rail system that won't go where I want to go. You can get me to Lake Norman or Rock Hill, but how do I get to Moore County? We can't get air service here for more than a few months every few years and it requires no infrastructure investments for an airline to come here. Do you really think it makes financial sense to build out a rail facility from Charlotte to here? Here's the current rail route from Charlotte to Southern Pines. Over a 6 hour trip: http://goo.gl/BsRPS Not sure how many miles that is, but at least triple the drive to Charlotte. This works great if you place no value on your time. Maybe some of the retired folks would be fine with that, but those of us still working have to be in specific places at specific times.

It's not, "If only we had high speed rail and unicorns!". It's, "If only we had enough population density to make high speed rail work for us! And unicorns!"

Jim, do you think you can respond without calling me brainless? That would be nice. See, snark is fine, a little humor is better. But name calling and put downs? Come on, buddy. That's the last refuge of the beaten.

JimRussell44 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Davey, The "brainless" remark was directed at whoever it applies to. I was not singling you out. Based on your recent comments to my proposal, you still are not getting the big picture. If you are in Atlanta and want to go to Southern Pines on the elevated monorail system being suggested, you would use the high speed link from Atlanta to Raleigh and then the local service to Southern Pines. Also, comparing the current railroad service to what is being suggested is comparing apples and oranges. I have ridden the Marta System in Atlanta on many occasions. I have driven in and around Atlanta more times than I care to count. The reason there is so much traffic on the highways and so few riders on Marta is because there is no incentive to leave the car in the garage. When the public transportation system can make it cheaper and faster to go from point "A" to point "B", you will see people change their habits. It's funny you use "population density" as the reason none of this would work. That very fact is why you will not see commercial airline service in Moore County. There are only a relative handful of people who would benefit from the restoration of commercial air service. By comparison, almost every citizen of Moore County would benefit from a well run, efficient and affordable mass transit system like the one I described. Other benefits include the jobs created to build and maintain it, the jobs created by having Moore County opened up to more than just a few wealthy retirees and corporate golfers. Remember, the World Golf Hall Of Fame is no longer located in Pinehurst because not enough people had access to it. If Dad, Mom and the two kids from Charlotte could hop on a monorail in the morning, visited the state capital in Raleigh, then headed on down to Pinehurst for a visit to the HOF and returned home to Charlotte in the evening, all at a reasonable cost, do you think more people might do it?

DaveyNC 3 months, 3 weeks ago

No, Jim, I understand what you are saying although I will confess that I didn't think you were actually proposing to build all new rail lines. The expense of that is staggering, far more than any other public works project I can think of, even the interstate highway system. That's why I looked at existing rail lines, since that would be the lowest cost option. Besides, I can't look at planned lines that don't exist.

Does this mean that you propose to take out a map and draw straight lines from Charlotte to every county seat within, say 250 miles of Charlotte and do the same from Raleigh on their side of the state? Because you're not going to get away with just serving Moore County. Every other county will want their rail line. And do you then propose that every other state do the same? The right of way costs alone would dwarf what it cost to send Armstrong and company to the moon. And that would create very few jobs, if any. The state already has people who do that.

It's not funny that I used population density, it's purposeful. Merely a large population isn't sufficient. The population needs to be packed into a relatively small area. NYC is very dense; there are single city blocks there that have more people in them than all of Moore County. That makes it really sensible to put a train station on that block. Considering the millions, or billions that it would cost to build new lines and stations into here, I cannot conceive of any way to make it work. I don't concede your point that such service would benefit everyone in Moore County. It would only benefit those who chose to use it. And any such benefit calculation would have to include the increased taxes and fees that would have to be imposed to build the system. Or, we could just borrow a few more trillion from China. What the hell, it's only money.

I read a great quote earlier this week, from Mark Steyn:

“We have looted the future to bribe the present, and at the bottom of the cliff the future is waiting for what we owe it.”

He can really turn a phrase, can't he?

Congratulations for continuing that tradition. As I said originally, you are proposing to spend an extravagant sum of money to pay for an amenity for a relative few. That's SOP for the Left. I mean, you guys just tied down 0bamacare mostly to cover 30 million or so uninsured people.

Finally, I have no idea why I thought you directed the "brainless" comment to me. Maybe because you started your comment by calling me by name?

DaveyNC 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Hey, alladat1? What was wingnutty about my original comment? I didn't say anything there about birth certificates or Kenya or Islam or the Man on the Grassy Knoll. You have a pretty low bar for what constitutes wingnuttery. I suspect you apply it to anyone who doesn't agree with you. Why not, instead of calling names, you lay out some of your thoughts?

C'mon, you can do it!