Well, at least for now people can still fly direct to Rhinelander. I suppose city officials could use that in Milwaukee's marketing plan. Sure, YX is gone and F9 failed. But WN/FL still have plenty of flights at MKE, therefore for what F9 loses, WN/FL gains. Not sure I see a jobs issue here, its more of a lesson in capitalism. WN has a viable business model and they had a strategy - that won - and now owns the market. The whole YX/F9 situation became a burning mess years ago, and what started the fire was YX using their "hometown" airline image to screw the area residents into thinking it was worth saving. Remember when all the local businessmen sucked up to the CEO of YX to stop FL from buying out them out because it would destroy the airline and ruin a Milwaukee product? That's how F9 ended up at MKE and how did that work out?
These cuts are bad news for the employees, but who really wants to fly out of MKE when the Amtrak can take you to Chicago and you can fly cheaper? Depending on where you're going it's almost better flying out of ORD or MDW anyways. There's plenty of direct flights anywhere you want to go and the hour and a half it takes to drive down to Chicago is about the same as the time in-between connecting flights out of MKE to your final destination. Just yesterday I was on F9's site to cash in some of my miles so that my wife could fly to New York and visit our daughter in June. The trip is still available (for 45k miles, when it was 35k yesterday), only now the only way you can get to LGA from MKE on F9 is to fly through DEN, for a total of six hours in the air and an hour or two layover. Or a little more than half the time it takes to drive to New York from Milwaukee.