Although SkyWest Airlines announced its intention to stop providing service to the Greenbrier Valley Airport, air service is not expected to be impacted immediately.
Airport Director Brian Belcher explained the withdrawal won’t affect service for the next several months, if at all. Further, an order from the United States Department of Transportation (DOT) prevents SkyWest from pulling out of the Lewisburg airport until another airline is secured.
“This sounds bad – it’s not as bad as it sounds,” said Belcher. “We’re going to continue to have service. You can continue to buy tickets with us and fly.”
Belcher said that any new provider to the airport will have to be as good as what the airport is able to offer with SkyWest.
“SkyWest has a good product, and we’re going to work as hard as we can to bring in a comparable service,” he said. “We don’t want anything less [than] jet service connected to the global network.”
SkyWest issued a notice of intent on Mar. 10, announcing its plans to terminate service at 29 smaller airports across the country, effective June 8. Greenbrier Valley Airport was on that list.
The air service filing stated, “although SkyWest Airlines, Inc. would prefer to continue providing scheduled air service to these cities, the pilot staffing challenges across the airline industry preclude us from doing so.”
SkyWest had stated in an earlier filing with the DOT that “the staffing imbalance caused by the COVID-19 pandemic hampers SkyWest’s ability to meet this schedule.”
Following the Mar. 10 notice of intent from the airline, the DOT responded to SkyWest’s announcement on Mar. 11, halting a full pull out.
“In the event that [DOT] does not secure another air carrier to provide essential air service at a community listed in this order, the department, … prohibits SkyWest Airlines, Inc., from terminating service at the points where replacement service is not secured for the 30-day period from June 8, 2022, through July 8, 2022 (and for additional 30-day periods as necessary), or until the date on which another air carrier begins essential air service at the community/communities, whichever occurs earlier,” reads the order.
Although this means the Greenbrier Valley Airport will soon be without SkyWest as a service provider, officials have time to find a new carrier.
The announcement left airport administrators disappointed.
“We understand the pilot shortage situation in today’s airline industry, but we feel all options should have been explored before Skywest/United took this drastic measure of leaving 29 small communities and putting them in a difficult position of finding another carrier,” said Deborah Phillips, Greenbrier County Airport Authority board chair. “We will work with our U.S. Senators and Congressional delegation in looking at all our options to solve this problem.”
Belcher, highlighting that this was his opinion, cited the airport’s rejection of a potential pilot training program as something that may have informed SkyWest’s decision to pull out of Greenbrier Valley Airport. In order to fly larger planes, he said, new pilots must first fly smaller planes for a number of hours. SkyWest approached the airport with a request for more service using smaller planes, he said.
“One of the solutions offered was a nine-seat aircraft solution that we [the airport authority and Belcher] didn’t think that would work in this market, considering that we’ve had jet service for so long,” Belcher explained. “Our clientele expects good service, they expect jet service, and that’s what we’d like to keep here. … As soon as we all kind of rejected that idea, because we told [them] we’d like for [them] to find another solution, then they came back two weeks later with this.”
Suspecting that SkyWest may be looking to remove service from the Greenbrier Valley, airport officials were already looking at other options.
“(In order) to keep our region connected to the global marketplace, we had already been in discussions with other airlines to serve this market prior to this announcement,” said Belcher.
Once another provider is in place, Belcher will be able to say if the current flights to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport will continue.
“We’re trying to work with airlines that have hubs,” Belcher said. “That can be any hub within a one-to-two-hour flight time. If you just look at the airline hubs, it could be any of those. I was going to say it might not be Chicago, but it could be, because they have other airlines besides United. We’re going to work with any airline that’s interested. You’ve got Charlotte, Atlanta, or any of the D.C. airports, New York airports.”
The notice lists SkyWest’s “annual contract subsidy rate” as $3,758,289, with the current term running from April 2020 to March 2023. The company was brought in after the termination of the airport’s contract with ViaAir in early 2018.
The filing also lists passenger traffic totals from the past several years, with 2018 totaling 15,483, 2019 as 24,531, 2020 as 11,993, and 2021 as 17,892. There are regularly 12 weekly round trips.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.