A proposal from Skywest Charter offers an intriguing possibility for keeping commercial jet service at Fort Dodge Regional Airport. We feel the U.S. Department of Transportation should act on it without further delay.

Some might ask, “What’s the big deal? There are jets that say Skywest on them at the airport every day.”

It is true that there are such jets at the airport. They are operated by Skywest as United Express flights which take passengers to Chicago O’Hare International Airport, where they can transfer to United Airlines flights to places all over the nation and world. The flights that serve Fort Dodge are subsidized with money from the federal Essential Air Service program, which provides funding to keep airlines going to smaller communities.

In March 2022, Skywest announced it would stop serving Fort Dodge and 28 other communities. The Department of Transportation has required the airline to keep serving those communities. however.

In June 2022, Skywest submitted a plan to the Department of Transportation under which it would serve those communities as a charter airline, which would enable it to operate under less restrictive rules. To do so, it would remove 20 seats from each jet, reducing their capacity to 30 passengers.

Wade Steel. chief commercial officer for Skywest Charter, recently pledged that even as a charter carrier, it would still have two pilots in the cockpit, each of whom would have a minimum of 1,500 hours of flying time. He said Skywest would also continue to screen passengers through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints.

We’re generally in favor of any proposal that would keep the jets flying to and from Fort Dodge.

In this case, we will make a couple of requests, however. First, we want to see the airline continue to use pilots with at least 1,500 hours of flying time and continue to use security checkpoints. We appreciate the fact that Steel made that commitment, and we want to see it stay in place even if the airline someday has different leadership.

Secondly, we would like to see Skywest do whatever it can to keep or secure agreements that will allow passengers to seamlessly transfer to other flights without having to collect their baggage and go through security again.

We call on the Department of Transportation to approve the proposal that Skywest submitted to it a year ago. The federal officials should give Fort Dodge and the other communities the chance to keep reliable commercial air service.