There’s a scene in Jurassic Park where Dr. Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, looks at the park’s creators and says, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” It’s a fitting parallel to the conversation about reinstating Essential Air Service (EAS) at Chautauqua County Jamestown Airport.

Maybe it’s possible to bring back government subsidized commercial flights, but should we?

I am a Jamestown native who, like many of my JHS Class of 2001 classmates moved away after high school in pursuit of a career. I have lived in Florida, Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina but finally felt “home” pulling me back to New York. In 2020, I relocated my family and my aviation consulting business, Chase Aviation Company to Jamestown in hopes of expanding operations. As such, I have a vested interest in the airport’s success and consider myself a stakeholder in its outcome.

We currently have three aircraft based here and recently expanded our services to provide aircraft management, basing the first turboprop aircraft at Jamestown since the airline left in 2018. We also pay to lease office space in the terminal building-space once occupied by TSA free of charge. If EAS returns, the airport has the right to terminate our lease (and has told us they will) and displace us from our headquarters. If that happens, we will most likely have no choice but to take our business, our aircraft, and our economic impact elsewhere.

So the stakes are particularly high for us, which may make me biased, so I’ll ask you: Should the county push out a locally based aviation business, one that pays to be here and contributes to the airport’s long-term viability, just to make room for another government-subsidized operation with a history of failure? What message does that send to other businesses and private sector?

As many other Letters to the Editor have explained, Jamestown has had multiple EAS providers over the years, and all have struggled. Most recently, Southern Airways Express operated subsidized flights between Jamestown and Pittsburgh but failed to maintain consistent passenger loads. Before that, Sun Air Express also attempted to make EAS work but faced operational and reliability issues. The Department of Transportation (DOT) finally revoked Jamestown’s EAS status in 2018, citing the airport’s failure to meet the 10-passenger-per-day requirement and a staggering subsidy per passenger that far exceeded federal limits. In short, these failures proved that the demand simply didn’t exist as it once did back in the 80’s and 90’s.

Meanwhile, we have two well-connected airports, Erie and Buffalo, offering reliable service to major hubs with no additional hoops to jump through before catching another flight. Instead of diverting time and resources into another doomed EAS experiment that will inevitably fall victim to pilot shortages, extreme winter headwinds, and the reality of even the best airline service today, we should focus on leveraging Jamestown’s strengths in business and general aviation.

We are already home to an excellent aircraft maintenance facility (Chautauqua Aircraft), a flight school (Great Lakes Flight Training) two aircraft sales companies (including our own) and now our aircraft management company; all served by a Fixed Base Operator (Centric Aviation) that delivers top notch ground services. Honorable mention for FedEx – technically an airline, though they are no longer operating aircraft from Jamestown; sound familiar? That aside, we have all the necessary ingredients for scalable, long-term solutions without any reliance on federal handouts other than those infrastructure grants already given by the FAA to maintain the US airport system.

So, I suggest we stop spending taxpayer dollars and County officials’ time dreaming of ways that we CAN bring back an airline, and ask them to really reconsider whether or not we SHOULD. And once they realize they shouldn’t, they will undoubtedly find their time and therefore our money better spent helping local businesses grow, providing better service at lower prices and attracting NEW people to come visit and hopefully stay in Chautauqua County.

Brian T. Chase owns Chase Aviation, which rents space in the Chautauqua County Airport at Jamestown.