Essential Air Services

I know EAS (Essential Air Services) are important factors in routes across America. Basically, this is a US government program that allows airlines to operate to small airports that had commercial service before all the mergers and regulations. 

Airlines who run these routes get a sizable bonus for providing service to these airports, anywhere from $417,000 to $4,710,000

Why does this apply to AE?

On some domestic routes, there is not enough demand or an efficient enough aircraft to run routes from one of these EAS airports to a larger airport. For example (Pardon the favoritism), Jamestown Airport has about eight passengers to Chicago O'hare, 3 to Pittsburgh, and One to Buffalo. One could possibly make a small profit off the ORD-JHW route, with a low frequency (3x B1900D Weekly), but there is no chance on the PIT-JHW or BUF-JHW. 

What happens in Real Life:

In real life, Sun Air Express operates Caravans and Chieftains on the PIT-JHW route about 4 times daily. They get paid $2,045,481 a year for this route. They can sustain this route as long as they keep getting money from it.

My suggestion:

If we could add a separate category for Essential Air Services in the Finance tab, every route you run that would categorize as Essential Air Service (Any flight to an airport that uses EAS in real life, found here) would be paid for by an EAS program. So if you run a route from JHW-PIT, you would get the same bonus as Sun Air Express. There are a lot of airports (about 160) that would benefit from this, and a lot of forgotten airports would be used in-game. This will make it more realistic and allow airlines to expand to areas they normally wouldn't go.

I did use Wikipedia, but all that I saw was true, they usually don't mess airline stuff up on purpose.

not a bad idea. However I cannot think of a way to implement this in the game. Maybe you get increased reputation from operating on these types of routes?

The thing is this doesn't only apply to the USA, other countries have it too. I think it would just be too big of a thing to implement.

I'm for anything that adds money to the green side of the ledger..... It would be great for when you first enter a world.

Great topic, I was thinking about starting something similar but I wanted to get more informed first... It would be great if it were implemented.

The thing is this doesn't only apply to the USA, other countries have it too. I think it would just be too big of a thing to implement.

That's right, and probably there are also a lot of other local subsidies, not only on national level.

Maybe there should be something more simple and systematic than finding all the real life subsidy agreements, maybe something like this:

- airport with under 30,000 pax/year - you get a $1500 subsidy per flight -- it must be at least 100 miles away from bigger airports?

(not per passenger because that would attract spamming A380s to some godforsaken villages, per flight incentive would serve to realize more realistic features that subsidies are meant to attract - solid frequency, and buying of real life 5-50 seaters that just don't get any attention in some worlds (and in some no one even buys profitable ATR42s or Q300s), and under 30 seats are generally barely or not at all profitable).

I just know that every airport should be used.

Here's how you do it (fully aware this could only be implemented on AE 4.x). When you start your airline and choose your airport, the system should generate a message that informs you of potential EAS airports associated with your home base. Whichever one you choose, the system will then "lock out" that route to other airlines. After a period of, say, one or two years in-game, every EAS route can be up for selection again. Limit this to home airports/hubs if you want.