coming home

From Drop Box

I'm sitting here reminiscing about all the times I've flown, particularly since I'm busy preparing for another flight.
The map represents all my commercial flights, as you can see , I do tend to gravitate towards one airport in particular. The only problems is that Lambert -Saint Louis is the worst kind of hub: an former one
You see once upon a time. there was this little company called Ozark Airlines:

And all was well and good, They even flew DC-9's to little old Podunk Cape Girardeau.
Then Airline deregulation happened. No more flights to the sticks on big planes. And the route of the swallows met this fellow named Carl Icahn, and it acquired a more famous name

by that time, It wasn't quite the "Trans World Airline". It continued until 2001, and the planes flying into "The Gateway to the West" Changed colors again:

Of course, the only problem was that American already had a hub in Chicago at O'hare. So they kept on subtracting flights until the hub was no more.
Which left me with a dilemma. You see, Cape Girardeau is about 150 miles south of the airport. You can still fly commercially there, but the service is now subsidized by the FAA. They restrict the Airline flying the route to one destination. The last carrier to fly the route only offered one flight a day,which never meshed with my schedule Since I live only two miles from the Ontario airport, I decided to save some money this time and fly the roundabout route (Atlanta going east, DFW going west) rather than drive to LAX and fly direct.
Well, The FAA didn't like the "one flight a day" Great Lakes offered, so they rebid the contract. The winner : the aptly named Cape (as in Cod, not Girardeau) Air. They offer four flights a day, but on older , smaller planes (Cessna 402 vs Beechcraft 1900). Amd they fly to and from STL. There was some talk about flying to Memphis, which is a Southern/Republic/Northwest hub, but it may wind meeting the same fate As Lambert under Delta.


And it sounds like it's going to be vintage plane week
ONT to ATL Boeing 757 (gee, I wonder which airline this is)
ATL - STL MCdonnell douglas MD-88
STL- DFW MD-82 (Wouldn't be surprised if the tail number ended in "TW" and it flew on the Route of the Swallows)
DFW -ONT MD-83 (once again, who says TWA is dead?)