That's not an accurate assessment in a couple of ways:

(1) Communities pursue this money, not the airlines.

(2) Although pretty much every community portrays their bid is if they have worked in close coordination with the airline, and a plane is all but idling on the ramp waiting for the grant money, that's just not true. Sometimes there is a letter of support from the airline, but essentially all the airline is saying is sure, go ahead and bid and we'll take a closer look if you win.

(3) More than occasionally these grants don't lead to the proposed flights starting, and the money goes unused.

(4) Frontier's name comes up frequently in these bids because they are just about the only low-fare airline left who might do this. AirTran used to be the target of many bids, but those days are over with Southwest's ownership.

(5) The money that these small community air service grants provide is pretty much inconsequential in moving the profit/loss needle at Frontier. Even with the subsidy, markets like STS-DEN and SBN-DEN are probably not much better than marginally profitable. If they don't get the grant money, then the same lift (typcially a mere 1x/day) probably goes to a different market with a similarly fair prospect for marginal profitability. Without

There are several markets out of Denver that Frontier could potentially add -- likely with 1x/day at first -- with a fair chance of being break even or better. Where these SCASD grants offer potential is that they tend to be markets below the threshold where anybody would try them without subsidy, but becuase they are untested they could prove to draw strong, profitable traffic. The also could underperform and not last very long. The goal of taking these grants, when they do, is to find markets that can be solidly profitable when the grant runs out.

One can make a viable arguement that this strategy takes assets away from other market-building, but this aspect of Frontier's strategy is not borne of SCASD grants. The low-frequency try-a-new-market strategy has been used in several unsubsidized cities including Sioux Falls, Little Rock, Madison, and Des Moines. I do recognize that some of these cities have done things like waiving landing fees or give marketing money to lure the service, but that has become so common these days it's nearly standard proceedure -- for example, Columbus offered to waive landing fees for a year on CMH-MCI to get someone to fly the market.