PADUCAH — Driving to the beach can be a long journey for Kentuckians, but Barkley Regional Airport is working to eliminate that barrier for the local community.
On Monday, Marketing Manager and Public Information Officer Kat Byars shared that the Barkley airport aims to establish a coastal flight route and is currently looking into creating pitches for airlines. While the exact destination is uncertain, Byars said Barkley has narrowed it down to five or 10 possible locations.
“They’re all in the decision-making process,” Byars said. “We may [have] a long way to go, but I’m hoping that we could get that Florida flight one day.”
In addition to seeking a beach route, the airport currently has two popular flight destinations to Chicago and Houston through SkyWest Airlines — which Byars said can take travelers to over 270 other connections.
“Getting service beyond that is called as ‘at-risk flights’ — big airlines are taking a chance on a community they don’t know about,” she said. “We put our offer in. We say, ‘Hey, here’s what we have. Would you want to come up here [and] fly us to Florida?’”
During her time at Barkley, Byars said the community’s response to adding a coastal flight destination has been the biggest response she has seen to anything at the airport so far.
“We had 7,500 people take our survey, and with that came the milestone of 2,000 Barkley Pledge signers,” she said. “The Barkley Pledge is an additional initiative; we ask you to sign it. It just says you support us and that you would really like to fly up our airport.”
The support has not only been from McCracken County; according to Byars, people from “all over” — including from Chicago and Houston — have signed up. She explained that Barkley will provide the surveys and signatures to airlines to show how many people are interested in a new route, increasing the odds of success.
“That’s the beauty of the ‘at-risk’ — we just can make a really good pitch, get our ducks in a row and hopefully we can get that here,” she said.
The enthusiasm for a coastal flight route may be widespread, but there are still barriers to overcome. As Byars noted, the flights to Chicago and Houston are federally funded, but a flight to the beach may not be.
“We are federally funded to have one airline at a time, which right now is United, operated by SkyWest,” she said. “The Florida flight will not be, so we have to start looking at those avenues of how do we subsidize this flight? That goes into the technical side that they’re all working out right now.”
She added that, to receive subsidized funding through the Essential Air Service — like with Barkley’s Chicago and Houston flights — the airport must comply with EAS requirements and connect to a hub within a certain range.
“For us, it is Chicago, and the very edge of that is Houston,” Byars said. “So, if we were to go in the Essential Air Service route, it would still have to be somehow in that radius. Not all Florida airports would likely be viable options for that.”
The process of establishing a coastal flight route may be a long one but, in the future, Barkley may have a new destination in either Alabama, Louisiana, Florida or another beach location.