MORGANTOWN — Five air carriers — Southern Airways Express, Boutique Airlines, Cape Air, Contour Airlines and SkyWest Airlines — are vying for Morgantown’s essential air service contract.
Essential Air Service, or EAS, is a federal subsidy provided directly to carriers to offset the cost of rural operations and ensure air service in smaller communities.
MGW Director Jon Vrabel said a committee of community stakeholders will conduct interviews with each carrier before making a recommendation to the U.S. Department of Transportation, which will make the final decision.
“The committee is required to make their recommendation to the U.S. DOT by the end of the first week of August. After that, it typically takes the U.S. DOT a few months to award the selected company,” Vrabel told The Dominion Post.
Southern Airways has been the EAS carrier servicing the Morgantown Municipal Airport since taking over for Silver Airways in 2016.
Based on recent comments by Morgantown City Manager Kim Haws, the city may be looking to catch a new ride.
On multiple occasions in recent months, Haws has said the relationship between the city and the state’s only municipally owned airport needs to change.
“It has been and continues to be the goal of the city to help the airport become self-sustaining. It is an enterprise fund, and what that means is that it stands on its own. It’s got to generate enough revenues to be able to pay for its own operations. That has not happened. I don’t know how many years it’s been,” Haws told Morgantown City Council.
According to Vrabel, it’s never happened “during the history of the airport.”
“We have always required some support from the city in order to function properly,” Vrabel said. “It has been vital, especially with our capital programs.”
One way the airport can become more self-sustaining is by surpassing 10,000 enplanements each year. Doing so releases $1 million in federal Airport Improvement Funds, which are capital infrastructure dollars.
Not hitting 10,000 enplanements, or paid customers boarding aircraft, cuts that allocation by 80%.
MGW has never surpassed 10,000 enplanements during Southern’s tenure in Morgantown. You’d have to go back to 2011 to find the last time the airport hit that threshold.
If you only go back to 2019, the year the FAA gave the all clear for Morgantown to begin its 1,001-foot runway extension project, MGW has left $4.25 million in project funding on the table based on enplanement numbers.
“In the next couple weeks, we’ll be interviewing these entities to see which one will give us not only a good fit for our usership here locally but would encourage other entities to utilize the airport more effectively, and, number three, help stabilize the enplanements that we’ve been talking about,” Haws said.
City leadership is also looking at the airport’s ability to support business as a future revenue source.
Earlier this week, city council approved a lease agreement with Trademark Aviation LLC for hangar space at MGW, which is also known as Walter L. Bill Hart Field.
“A couple key business partners in the area are putting this company together and they’re leasing the facility from us to provide charter services, aerial photography and aircraft maintenance services,” Vrabel said.
Haws said there’s likely more of this to come.
“The rental of the hangar, the construction of another hangar and potential construction of a third hangar are all part of the process of trying to help the airport sustain itself and stand on its own two feet,” he said. “Certainly, they want to as badly as we want them to.”
Lastly, Haws said the city has hired an FAA-focused consultant out of Washington, D.C., to aid the city’s plea for additional federal dollars, particularly as it grinds through the ongoing runway extension project.
As of May, the city was three years into what was initially envisioned as a five-year project and had spent about $14 million on what’s now estimated to be a $62 million undertaking.
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