Cape Air/Nantucket Airlines has submitted a bid to the federal Department of Transportation to bring commercial air service back to Lancaster Airport.
Three other air carriers also made bids by the midnight Friday deadline.
The Cape Air proposal is for five daily nonstop, round-trip flights from Lancaster to Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. If the bid is accepted, the company plans to begin flights no later than April 2009, around the time the Lancaster County Convention Center opens.
Cape Air is asking for an annual Essential Air Service subsidy of $1.372 million to operate the service, which comes out to $160 a passenger.
The other bidders are Tradewind Aviation, based in Oxford, Conn.; Aviation Technologies Inc., based in Avoca, Luzerne County; and TransportAzumah Air Services, based in Far Rockaway, N.Y.
Tradewind is proposing six or eight flights a day to Philadelphia, and TransportAzumah is offering daily flights to New York City and Chicago. Aviation Technologies has two proposals, one for a daily flight to Pittsburgh and one to Chicago.
The Essential Air Service subsidy expires Sept. 30, 2009, but Congress is expected to renew it for four more years, said Lancaster Airport Authority finance and marketing manager Joyce Opp.
The last commercial carrier at Lancaster Airport, Mesa Air Group, which operated 18 round-trip flights a week to Pittsburgh, stopped service here in September 2007 when Congress threatened to cut EAS funds.
The next step is for the Lancaster Airport Authority to file comments with the federal Department of Transportation on which of the four bids it favors. The department will probably make a decision within 30 days, Opp said.
It's likely the Airport Authority will ask the federal government to choose Cape Air, she said.
The average Cape Air round-trip fare from Lancaster to Baltimore/Washington International would be $119, including taxes and fees. But Opp has calculated that a business traveler would save $157 in parking, mileage and other costs on top of that by flying Cape Air to BWI rather than driving.
BWI offers 2,056 weekly departures to 66 destinations.
Another big asset in Cape Air's favor, Opp said, is that it has ticketing and baggage agreements with most major airlines so customers can purchase a single-trip ticket through an online service such as Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia.
The Lancaster Airport Authority also was awarded more than $182,000 in grant money to market the new commercial air service to business travelers, she said.
Owned by Massachusetts-based Hyannis Air Service Inc., Cape Air presently flies 54 nine-passenger Cessna 402s in the Northeast, the Caribbean and the Florida Keys, and two 46-passenger ATR-42s in Micronesia.
It also has a bid in to provide service from Hagerstown (Md.) Regional Airport to BWI; that and the Lancaster Airport bid represent its first efforts to expand into the mid-Atlantic states.
Cape Air's initial route — from Boston to Provincetown, Mass. — began in October 1989 with two aircraft.
Last year it carried more than 650,000 passengers, and on peak days operates up to 550 flights.
There's a lot of local enthusiasm for bringing Cape Air to Lancaster, and Cape Air's just as excited at the prospect of coming here, its president and chief executive, Daniel A. Wolf, said in a phone interview Saturday.
"You need to have a good partnership with the community," he said.
Wolf also said the opening of the Lancaster County Convention Center in the spring could be a "win-win" for Cape Air and the convention center by increasing business for both.
While Cape Air will be using Essential Air Service funds in the short term, he said he envisions demand here growing to a point where the subsidy is no longer needed.
That's because Cape Air employs small, relatively low-cost aircraft (instead of bigger planes that are harder to fill with passengers); flies short distances; and has inexpensive fares, Wolf said.
Tom Baldrige, chairman of the Lancaster Air Service Task Force, said one of the reasons he likes Cape Air is because it has a strong track record of working with the communities in which it operates.
It's willing to be flexible with departure times, for example, to meet market demand, said Baldrige, who's president of the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
Baldrige also wants to see Lancaster Airport shed its dependence on the EAS subsidy, and "I think Cape Air will prove the strongest way to get there," he said.
Restoring commercial air service to Lancaster is great news not just for business travelers but leisure travelers, too, said Chris Barrett, president and chief executive of the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau and a member of the Air Service Task Force.
Barrett was at the airport last Monday to hear a proposal by Cape Air, and he came away impressed.
"They're very customer service-oriented," he said. "I think they'll be a great addition."
Paula Wolf is a staff writer for the Sunday News. She can be reached by e-mail at pwolf@lnpnews.com.
