Drop in air travel could hurt Illinois' small airports hardest

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Williamson County Regional Airport officials are counting their customers with particular care these days.

The slump in air travel nationwide that followed the Sept. 11 attacks has meant the number of people who boarded the Marion airport's four daily TWA flights to St. Louis dropped nearly in half from August to September, said airport manager Doug Kimmel.

The trend is similar at airports nationwide, including the biggest like O'Hare International and Midway in Chicago, as millions of passengers stay home and airlines, losing money from empty seats, cut their flights.

But small airports are suffering disproportionately because their budgets are so dependent on a few airlines, said Kimmel and other officials at small airports in Illinois. A continuing travel slump could translate into big problems for the smallest airports in the state, they say.

"You can see across our whole economy, businesses, including airlines, are cutting back," said Robert O'Brien, aviation director at Springfield's Capital Airport.

"A small community that only has one airline and three flights, that airline can't stick around on wishful thinking," said O'Brien, who's confident Springfield will survive despite its own slumping numbers. "This could be their death knell."

Two key factors

Among Illinois' 11 commercial airports, three -- in Decatur, Marion and Mascoutah -- are each served by a single carrier. Others, such as the cluster of four airports in central Illinois -- in Bloomington-Normal, Peoria, Champaign and Springfield -- depend on just a few airlines. That makes them vulnerable on two key factors in their budgets.

Airports that fall below an annual minimum of 10,000 boarding passengers don't qualify for millions of dollars in federal funds for things like runway extensions, firefighting equipment and other capital improvements.

Some 700 people boarded planes at Williamson County Airport last month, down from 1,300 in the peak travel month of August. Kimmel said although October numbers are up so far, the overall trend concerns him.

"The boardings we've had recently have come very close to putting us below 10,000" for the year, he said.