Oregon Public Broadcasting

This weekend, Newport and Astoria take flight.

Travelers in those two cities haven’t had scheduled air service for more than a decade.

As Ethan Lindsey reports all that changes Sunday, when Seaport Airlines begins flights to the coastal cities.

SeaPort features valet parking, cargo shipping, and easy online booking.

And yet, a 9-seat propeller plane without a bathroom isn’t exactly the airline experience I’m used to.

That’s abundantly clear when the pilot climbs on board.

Pilot Ambi: “Beep beep beep. No laughing at the big guy getting into the small cockpit now. Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle. This is a great airplane, just two things wrong: seatbelts are hard to put on and too small of a cockpit.”

Still, residents in Newport and Astoria are clamoring for the service.

George Boehlert says it’s a no-brainer as to why.

Boehlert’s the director of the Hatfield Marine Science Center, in Newport.

Just last week, he had a business trip to Washington D.C. But first he needed to get to Portland.

George Boehlert: “And I drove my car up there and I stayed at a hotel because it was an early morning flight. When traffic’s not bad you can do it in 2 and a half hours. But generally when the weather’s bad, that’s the worst because you get ice on some of the roads.”

Next month, when Boehlert is flying to China, he may book a flight from Newport-to-Portland-to-San Francisco-to the Far East.

SeaPort will offer its Newport flights timed specifically to serve as connectors to Portland.

Few thought Newport would ever see commercial air service again. Horizon Air abandoned the city more than a decade ago.

So the city teamed with Astoria to collect more than 4-(m)million-dollars in federal and state grants.

The cities used that money to sign a $4.5 million deal with Portland-based SeaPort for the next two years.

Kent Craford is the CEO of the airline.

The windows of his corner office look down on the PDX tarmac.

Kent Craford: “We’re just wholly different than the major airlines. We’re really like having your own private plane, but on a schedule and for $149.”

Another big selling point? You don’t have to take off your shoes off at the Transportation Security Administration checkpoints.

Kent Craford: “Everybody says, don’t you want to get larger planes at some point? Well, NO! The whole point is to stay small so you stay below the T.S.A. threshold. And if we grow, we’re just gonna add units – we’ll have a fleet of mosquitoes instead of a few large buses, I guess.”

SeaPort started buzzing back-and-forth between Portland and Seattle in June.

But the regional aviation industry didn’t really take any notice until October.

That’s when SeaPort beat out Horizon Air for a $3 million federal contract to fly to Pendleton.

Craford says the Pendleton flight has been a huge boost in an ailing market.

On a recent Monday morning, I was the only passenger on a flight between Seattle and Portland.

Kent Craford: “I’ll tell you, it wasn’t our original plan to serve rural markets. We were going to do the mainline, Seattle-Portland. And then the economy did what it did. We knew it would take a long time to take off. We didn’t know it would take this long and that the headwinds would be this strong, but these opportunities arose in rural markets and its been the best decision we’ve made.”

Richard Gritta is a professor of finance and aviation at the University of Portland.

Gritta’s spent a lot of his career researching the airline industry. You can tell by all the model airplanes set up in his home office.

But his message for SeaPort is short and sweet.

Richard Gritta: “Its not a good time to be starting an airline.”

Craford doesn’t deny that.

He just thinks that the guaranteed-government money from rural service is a game-changer.

Kent Craford: “Pendleton for us was a watershed event. Because that next week, I got calls from Baker City, and Burns, and Roseburg. There’s a hunger for air service in rural Oregon.  There’s a future for air service to these rural communities and it will be on a platform like ours.”

Millions of federal stimulus dollars are set aside for an expansion of air service. State dollars, too.

That’s why other rural Oregon communities hope the coastal service is successful, so that the money will flow.