Small Communities Are Being Misled by “Leaders” Ignoring Realities

In this week’s Touch & Go™ I made the observation that as far as addressing rural air service goes, leadership from the feds and aviation alphabet groups has left the building.
This was proven by the shameful and cowardly performance at the June 4 House hearings on rural air service. The observations, conclusions and recommendations at that event mirrored a supposed group of industry leaders running hard to avoid taking on the hard realities of air service and instead whining about the “old days” when the economy and consumer realities were completely different from today.
When air transportation held a completely different role as a communication channel.
When Beech-99s and Saab-340s and Shorts 360s and Metro IIIs roamed the skies in the hundreds. Before the evolution of other communication channels supplanted the need to carry important papers and documents from Albany to Buffalo or from Shreveport to New Orleans.
Before the speed and efficiency of electronic interaction decimated the need for a day trip from Hartford/Springfield to New York for a 3-hour meeting. Before raw shifts in economics made those small airliners unprofitable, even if the traffic demand had not atrophied because it was non-competitive and too expensive and too slow to compete.
Bill Swelbar’s latest post says what the attendees at the June 4 hearing were too frightened to admit. In a published letter responding to the GAO’s attendee’s appalling veneer and misleading testimony, he observed the truth too obvious to ignore:
“…No one has the guts to take on the issues. Not airport trade associations, Congress, DOT, to name a few. GAO should at least provide the other side of the story because there are 2 sides to this near 50-year-old proposition that if you had commercial air service at some point in time, service levels are to be provided in perpetuity even if markets change…”
It’s nothing short of cowardice to refuse to tell airports and small communities the hard truth. I referred to this on the last T&G but Mr. Swelbar has put the situation and the foundation of it in clear concise words: we have a very serious case of planning fright at the top – at the DOT, at the alphabet organizations that apparently are fearful of their members to speak out clearly, and the intentionally misinformed small communities that are being fed intellectual garbage instead of hard facts.
Naturally, the perpetrators of the Kabuki Theater event on June 4 will righteously denounce this factor and the heretics who dare illuminate the thought and planning paralysis that has diverted communities from facing the truth and instead getting hoodwinked into the equivalent of believing in the air service Easter Bunny.