Columbia Missouri is a small regional airport with 3 CRJ 200 flights per day to ATL. Frontier is adding 2 A320 flights per week to MCO in November. While this is not a lot of service, it is without government subsidy. There are no federal or local essential air service subsidies. Now the local government has worked out an agreement with AA where they are guaranteeing AA $3 million to provide 3 daily flights - 1 to ORD and 2 to DFW.

At first I was excited since this would save me 2 hour drives to STL for AA flights, but then I heard the rest of the story. American is free to pull out after the completion of the 1 year deal. DL has now sent a letter to the city commission saying that they refuse to compete in non-free markets and will leave if AA gets a subsidy and DL doesn't. If DL leaves due to the local government interference, and at the end of the year AA decides COU service is not profitable (they last pulled out of COU in 2002) then COU will be down to two weekly flights to MCO. The worst case would be if local government starts a snowball effect by now offering DL $3 million guarantee as well. In this case government didn't build it, they are beginning to tear it down with their meddling in free enterprise.