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I thought the whole point of this airline was to set up direct flights from recruiting hotspots/player family locations direct to LNK to make it easy for them to get here for game days & visits. Seems like you'd have pretty good demand on flights based around fall Saturdays & OV peaks (and a willing university to "partner"/subsidize for that sort of thing), but keeping a full year-round schedule was surprising.
that very well may have been the “point” but even then that isn’t a “sustainable” model. You can’t setup an entire airline for 7-12 weekends a year of traffic. They made a decision to try to appeal to leisure travel from OMA and LNK by servicing destinations that didn’t have direct flight access from OMA.
What they should’ve done, in my opinion, is fly 2-3x a day to “hub” airports at either American Airlines or Delta hub cities (such as Charlotte, Dallas, Philadelphia) and then allowed for those passengers to book through to a final destination that ISNT one of those cities by getting an agreement with American Airlines or Delta or whoever.
This would’ve required a significantly larger financial commitment to secure planes, pilots, staff, etc at a time when inflation is high, jet fuel is incredibly expensive, and there is a pilot shortage. Not exactly ideal but they essentially just lit $3M or whatever the subsidy they had was on fire by half assing it.
That, along with finding a way to allow people to connect through LNK, was the only remote chance this thing had at generating the traffic it needed to make it. Solely relying on the city of Lincoln to stuff a 90 seat bird to Nashville weekly was absolutely crazy