Again, if you believe Bombardier's marketing hype, the additional number of seats required to make a Q400 break even compared to a Q200 is measured in the single digits.

The lame excuse AS has bandied about is that they can't make fare increases stick in OTH, and that's been true for 21- and 14-day fares. The YAS fares have looked like intrastate Alaska fares per seat mile.

This might be a market where adding a saturday stay and R/T requirement for the lowest fares would have moved some of the tools who fly in to golf (you know who you are, and have a nasty habit of trying to take my seat) into a somewhat higher fare bucket.

QX did not go to the community and say "Hey, we're losing our shirts here, we need some revenue guarantees". They just up and left. My fervent hope, when the Q200 retirement was announced, was that the "wallet" function meant a return to the prepaid ticket books on QX routes and we could have mounted a campaign to save the business - landing fees and airport rents *could* have been waived, frequency could have been reduced to two Q400s /day instead of 4 200s, etc. I always thought that a service like the PDX-RDD-ACV-LAX would have made sense SEA-OTH-ACV/STS-LAX.

It just feels like QX threw in the towel like a bunch of nervous cowards on this one, and I don't think Skywest is going to be viable for OTH-SEA for my travel plans. I'm writing this stuck in CEC because Skywest couldn't manage, once again, to get the CEC-bound aircraft out. =0( I plan to see OTH service again when pigs line up for takeoff on bacon wings.

Eric, Wondering If Any Of The Beancounters At QX Know The Difference Between Chickenshit and Chicken Salad.