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Town board wants Boutique Air to continue flights at Massena International Airport

Posted 12/4/18

By ANDY GARDNER North Country Now MASSENA -- The Massena Town Council is recommending the Essential Air Service contract at Massena International Airport go to their current carrier, Boutique Air. …

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Town board wants Boutique Air to continue flights at Massena International Airport

Posted

By ANDY GARDNER
North Country Now

MASSENA -- The Massena Town Council is recommending the Essential Air Service contract at Massena International Airport go to their current carrier, Boutique Air.

Town Supervisor Steve O’Shaughnessy said the board unanimously voted to support Boutique at a special meeting Monday night.

“We’re going to recommend a two-year contract with the three flights to Boston through Boutique,” the supervisor said. “We chose Boutique over Skywest because of the frequency of the flights. Boutique is three per day and Skywest was two, and going to different destinations, so we felt that was a positive.

“We also didn’t like the schedule Skywest had proposed, hopscotching from Massena to Ogdensburg and back.”

Boutique is planning three daily flights to Boston Pilatus PC-12 single-engine propeller planes. At a Nov. 28 meeting where Boutique and Skywest both made sales pitches for the EAS contract, Boutique president Shawn Simpson said they are looking at adding twin-prop Piaggio Avanti airplanes, which he says are more fuel-efficient and are about as fast as a jet.

At the same meeting, Greg Atkin, Skywest's managing director of marketing development, told the Town Council they plan to use 50-passenger United-branded jets to make four daily flights back and forth between Massena and Ogdensburg and Chicago and Washington, D.C. Their offer is contingent on it going to both Massena and Ogdensburg. The Ogdensburg Bridge and Port Authority, which oversees the Ogdensburg airport, is supporting Skywest.

O’Shaughnessy said the federal Department of Transportation has the final say on which carrier gets the EAS contract.

“We have to write a recommendation to them, and they make a decision, and to tell you the truth I’m not really sure how much weight we have on that,” he said, adding that he wants to speak with an EAS representative to see where the feds are leaning.