City, MU must cooperate, buck up and shoot for Chicago connection

As city officials and airport advocates work behind the scenes to come up with a plan to ensure the airport’s survival, the public must get behind the idea of subsidizing air transportation and setting an ambitious goal: connecting to Chicago.

The public knows little about the airport’s significant existing and projected freight and general aviation operations, and lengthening the barely adequate main runway to bolster commercial opportunities is an initiative that has been neglected far too long.

But while some whine about the city’s desire to acquire land to expand the principal runway beyond its 6,500-foot length, possibly invoking the use of its eminent domain powers, developments brewing behind closed doors could be hugely significant.

Columbia should not allow its airport to go down in history as another missed opportunity. The city stagnated initially because it was not placed closer to the Missouri River. In the early 1850s, it lost out again when the tiny community refused to subsidize the trans-state North Missouri Railroad, opting to forego heading straight west, which would have necessitated construction of a costly trestle across the Loutre River valley 40 miles east of here instead veering northwest to Moberly.

Those early losses aside, Columbia vigorously supported the first trans-state motor highway—initially called Route 2, U.S. Highway 40 after 1926 and now Interstate 70—by providing financial support for the bridge across the Missouri River that opened at Boonville in 1924. Since 1938, Columbia has subsidized its airport and, more recently, bought the 22-mile long Norfolk-Southern railroad branch line to Centralia.

The matter of maintaining regularly scheduled passenger air service is clearly cut from the cloth of subsidization. Looking over the Aug. 1, 1967, Ozark Airlines timetable shows a rather extensive ensemble of flights in and out of Columbia, including four weekday connections to the Chicago-O’Hare Airport. For example, Flight 356 left the old Columbia Municipal Airport at 7.35 a.m., making intermediate stops at St. Louis, Decatur and Peoria before arriving in Chicago at 11.40 a.m. Planes carried the U.S. mail back then. The service helped subsidize Ozark’s multiplicity of flights, so the one-way fare to Chicago was only $26!

O’Hare—a mere 315 miles northeast of here—would, of course, be the destination to shoot for. The initial hurdle would be to secure a gate, a slot in that huge facility’s roundhouse of operations that may be available at some point. Then there’s soliciting a carrier to provide flights by offering our concrete, financially backed guarantee that there are enough mid-Missourians out there to regularly support several daily roundtrips to this sprawling hub.

What’s a good number to wave before a potentially interested air carrier? The options are more limited these days, but say we waved our cash in front of American or United, which have a dominate presence at O’Hare? We could start out with $1 million, but that probably is not enough to get anyone really interested. Consider 260 days of flight operations—that’s Monday through Friday—when most business travel occurs. Divide a million dollars by those 260 days, and you come up with $3,847 per day. Let’s say the basic one-way fare is $100, which means that the area would have to guarantee about 40 passages per day. The initial schedule might be two daily round trips or a total of four daily flights.

Maybe a million dollars would get someone’s attention but I believe the true number would be a multiple of that. If the entree to O’Hare costs us $4 million a year, that would mean guaranteeing 160 bookings per day. That number divided by four flights per day means each flight would have to have a minimum of 40 passengers. Ambitious? Maybe, but let’s see. So much for our amateur fling at passenger airline economics.

It’s time to get serious about scheduled airline service in Central Missouri. The interests that have to step up to the plate include the government of the State of Missouri; the University of Missouri-Columbia and other educational institutions; the medical, research and insurance community; the cities of Columbia, Jefferson City, Fulton, Moberly, Boonville, Mexico and others along with their respective chambers of commerce and industrial development boards; and the myriad of other business and professional organizations throughout the region. They should organize a Central Missouri travel consortium that would pool its resources to guarantee in writing whatever subsidy would be required to guarantee air service to Chicago.

Forty years ago, you could fly in and out of Columbia from 30 different Midwestern cities ranging from Bloomington, Ill., to Waterloo, Iowa. While those days may be history, there has to be a way to connect Columbia with one of the world’s largest hub airports: Chicago-O’Hare. It’s all about money, subsidies and whether our area can guarantee a certain minimum number of airline travelers per day. The region’s largest employer—the State of Missouri—is the key here. They need to step up to the plate and support scheduled airline service to the nearest world-class airport: Chicago O’Hare. The economic, social and cultural future of mid-Missouri depends on it.