Sun Country Has Lost It’s Sole EAS Route
I made a whole topic on the Essential Air Service, but I’ll give a quick refresher here. EAS is a Department of Transportation project which subsidizes flights to small towns, to ensure air connection to larger towns and hubs. Typically, the routes are picked up by regional subsidiaries of larger airlines (think America Eagle, Delta Connection, etc.), but there are some airlines that specialize in this type of flying, like Contour and Southern.
For the past 2 years, Minneapolis based ULCC leisure carrier, which serves over 100 cities across the US, Canada, Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, has served an Essential Air Service (EAS) route from Minneapolis to Eau Claire, Wisconsin (EAU/KEAU), just 84 miles west of the Twin Cities. The flight, run 4x weekly on Sun Country’s Boeing 737-800s is blocked for 44 minutes, but typically takes around 20 in practice. From Eau Claire, Sun Country also operates flights to Las Vegas, Orlando, and Fort Myers during the Winter season, which weren’t covered under the government subsidization.
This flight is the only EAS route served by a 737. EAS bids only last a certain amount of time, and Eau Claire chose a Skywest service (under the United Express branding) to Chicago/O’hare over Sun Country’s renewed bid.
This is far from the end of Eau Claire’s Sun Country flights. Eau Claire’s Chippewa Valley Airport received seasonal service from SCX to Las Vegas, Orlando, and Fort Myers, which Sun Country has no intentions of stopping. This also presumably means MSP-EAU will still be a flight, for repositioning purposes. Hopefully they still sell seats on it! There was at least some demand, since flights were regularly at least half full.
Sun Country has entered bids to serve EAS routes from Minneapolis to Rhinelander (Wisconsin) and Brainerd (Minnesota), both cities served by Skywest from Minneapolis under the Delta Connection branding.
