The $3.5 Million Airport With Nine Seats

McCook is in Nebraska. Its airport handles a few daily takeoffs and landings by nine-seat aircraft flying to and from Denver. Under the EAS contract recommended in 2024, the first-year subsidy request was $3.567 million for twelve round trips a week, less than two a day on average. The planes often fly half empty because they have only nine seats.

A few facts are easy to get wrong. The TSA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, not the NSA. McCook does have a TSA screening point, but that money comes from the TSA’s own budget, not the EAS subsidy. EAS money is an operating-loss subsidy paid to the airline so a carrier will keep flying a route that makes no commercial sense. The $3.567 million is the federal government’s annual subsidy for one route, not the cost of a village security team. The road distance from McCook to Omaha is about 455 kilometers, roughly four and a half hours by car. To Lincoln it is about 378 kilometers, roughly three hours and forty-five minutes. “You can only travel long-distance through this airport” is true for commercial aviation. “You simply cannot survive without it” is an exaggeration.

Correcting these details does not end the argument. It sharpens it: a nine-seat airplane flies twelve times a week, draws more than $3 million in federal subsidies a year, and sits next to a highway. Should the money be spent?

The critics’ arithmetic is easy. Spread $3.567 million across twelve round trips a week, and the subsidy per round trip is close to $6,000. The entire EAS program costs about $550 million a year across the 48 states and Hawaii. A nine-seat plane carrying a handful of people back and forth looks like a business that should be optimized away. Shut it down, and the savings can go to roads, tax cuts, or somewhere else. The argument is clean and coherent.

It answers the wrong question. EAS is not an investment. It is a transfer. Investment asks about the rate of return. A transfer asks who is included. McCook’s airport is not there to make a profit or to have passengers’ tickets cover the cost. It is there to keep a community that the market has abandoned geographically connected to the national air network. The difference is like insurance versus investment. You cannot argue that insurance was wasted because you did not have an accident this year; insurance matters in the extreme case. Nor can you argue that a route should not exist because only five people were on the plane today. The value of the route includes scenarios that never show up in ticket revenue: an elderly person needing a quick transfer in a medical emergency, people getting out when a blizzard closes the roads, young people deciding whether to leave for good because their hometown has no airport, a small business deciding whether to locate in a remote area. These scenarios do not bring revenue to the airline. They shape a place’s sense of whether it still belongs to this country.

A society that judges everything by revenue per square foot will close every unprofitable bookstore, post office, rural clinic, and feeder route, then wonder why people in those places feel forgotten. A community is not held together by average utilization. It is held together by “even if you use it rarely, you are still counted.”

Since 1978, EAS has faced countless cut proposals, and Congress has preserved it almost every time. This is not because lawmakers do not understand efficiency. The communities that benefit from EAS are mostly sparse, spread across farm belts, mountain states, and remote areas. They do not have many people, but they are not weak in Senate politics. The subsidies are spread widely enough that it is hard for any single district to single them out for cuts. For local voters, the airport is a symbol that “we are still here.” For local politicians, cutting it means publicly declaring that they have given up on the periphery. The costs are shared by taxpayers nationwide, the benefits are concentrated in a few communities, and the politics remain stubbornly durable. This mechanism does not need a graft-taking official named Smith to explain it. It runs on its own.

EAS has room for improvement. Subsidy contracts can be more transparent, carrier selection can be more competitive, ground transport and the air network can be better connected, and telemedicine and regional hubs can take over some functions. Efficiency can be a constraint, but it cannot be the only objective. The state’s objectives also include reachability across its territory, formal equality of citizenship, socialized sharing of risk, and the economic survival of remote areas. These goals cannot be added up on a single income statement, but they are part of the legitimacy of a political community.

McCook’s few nine-seat airplanes are, commercially, a bad ledger; politically, a vote; geographically, a sovereign state’s confirmation of reach across its territory. The question is who decides how much “leaving no corner behind” is worth. That price has no income-statement answer. It requires political judgment and public debate about a trade-off between efficiency and fairness. Running a country like a company is the shortcut that avoids this question: it pretends everything can be converted into money, and then lets the things that cannot be converted quietly disappear from the books.