AUBURN — The Twin Cities could be home to an air taxi service, according to a plan being considered by the Lewiston and Auburn city councils this spring.
Rick Lanman, director the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport, said the service could be a more expensive, but more convenient, travel option for local business owners.
It would allow local passengers to hire the service to fly them to a regional airport and back. He imagines the service could carry passengers all over the Northeast directly from Lewiston-Auburn and back.
It would be similar to a charter air service, but less expensive.
“It’s not the plush charter aircraft like people imagine,” Lanman said. “There might be catering, but it’s most likely going to be a brown paper bag you pick up before you get on the plane.”
Lanman said he’d like to find competitive service operators to work out of the Auburn airport. He has not begun looking for a service.
“We want to find a service that is willing to come in, and we’d probably want to hangar their aircraft here so they can establish a base of operations,” Lanman said. “It’s all things we’ll have to negotiate and do not know how it will all shake out.”
The airport received a $600,000 federal Small Community Air Service Development grant in 2011 to investigate ways to bring passenger air travel to the Auburn airport.
“What we are trying to do is come up with something that has a reasonable chance of operating on its own after that federal funding is gone,” Lanman said. “We are trying to develop something that will bring passengers to the airport and let them fly out of here, but we will not be in direct competition with Portland.”
The cities would need to come up with a $100,000 match to use the grant — $50,000 per city. Lanman and the airport board have included the funding in their budget requests to each city for the next fiscal year. Both City Councils are reviewing their 2015-16 spending plans now.
“If it goes through the councils, we can begin in earnest,” he said. “If it does, we can work to find an air taxi operator — or two, or three — that we can afford with that grant money.”
Most of the grant money would go to pay passenger revenue miles, a form of minimum rate for air taxi operators. Grant money would pay for vacant seats on trips, keeping the price-per-seat competitive.
“It’s seed money,” Lanman said. “There’s only enough money there to get you started, and when you run out of money you are done unless you can be self-sufficient at that point.”
He said the service would be most useful to local Maine businesses making one-day business trips. They’d be able to fly direct, without having to go through airline hubs.
“Flying out of this airport will be about time management,” he said. “It’s not about making it cheaper, but it would be easier. You’d be able to fly out in the morning, do your business and fly home and sleep in your own bed without having to pay for a hotel.”
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