Big Sky adding time to schedule, extra plane to deal with airport delays

Passengers using air service from Cape Girardeau Regional Airport in November experienced higher-than-normal delays and flight cancellations.

Weather and the need to make repairs caused some problems, according to Bruce Loy, Girardeau Regional Airport's manager, and Fred de Leeuw, president of Big Sky Airlines.

Big Sky provides connection service for Delta with two flights daily from Cape Girardeau to Cincinnati. From Cincinnati, passengers can connect to 400 other destinations. But the plane Big Sky uses for Cape Girardeau flights is also used for Cincinnati connections to Owensboro, Ky., and Jackson, Tenn.

Starting Monday, an extra plane will be used to prevent cancellations; flight plans will include extra blocks of time, from 10 to 15 minutes per flight, de Leeuw said.

Three of the 26 flights scheduled for November were canceled in response to weather problems.

"That doesn't always have to be a weather problem here. It can be somewhere else," Loy said. Many other flights have been late, though neither Loy nor de Leeuw would give an exact figure or indicate the length of delays.

"I'm sure 50 percent, at least 50 percent, of the flights have been late," de Leeuw said Friday.

He said small flight delays on one flight snowball through the day.

"As flights get later in the day, [pilots[']] duty service time runs out," he said. "If you're more than 15, 20 minutes late, it can cause a one-hour delay. There's not a magic potion to the thing. It's a million little pieces, and this is a new route that's never been flown before."

He said a 40-minute de-icing of a plane at Cincinnati led to an overall two-hour delay of flights Wednesday that resulted in a flight to Cape Girardeau being canceled.

Over the next few weeks, he said he expects the flights to be on time more often. As schedule consistency improves, he anticipates more people booking flights.

"I've been through this before," Loy said. "I've never had a new airline start service that didn't run into some problems just starting out. I have every bit of confidence that they're going to be able to make sure it's operated appropriately. And if it's not, we'll have to take a look at it."

pmcnichol@semissourian.com

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