Unhealthy information if you’ll want to journey to one in all America’s smaller airports. Insider reviews regional airline firm Aha! has declared chapter and shut down. The transfer comes lower than a 12 months after the airline launched, and simply over a month after it was referred to as the “quickest rising regional airline within the western US.”
Aha! was born of the pandemic. After ExpressJet, one of many oldest regional airways within the nation, filed for chapter within the fall of 2020, Aha! was based out of its ashes simply over a 12 months later.
Utilizing small, 50-seat Embraer planes, the airline linked smaller regional airports within the western US for point-to-point journey. In case you wanted to get someplace like Bakersfield (god solely is aware of why somebody would want to fly into Bakersfield) or Eugene, Oregon, Aha! was your airline.
However ongoing international points rang the dying knell for the corporate. In a ready assertion, CEO Subodh Karnik stated a “mixture of situations” led to the airline submitting for chapter and ceasing operations instantly. Amongst them: rising gas prices, a scarcity of plane availability and a pilot scarcity. “Regardless of the valiant efforts of our workers to beat challenges, and regardless of nice help by our cities and airports – particularly Reno-Tahoe and the group there, we arrived at a degree the place termination of operations was in the very best curiosity of our stakeholders,” Karnik stated in a press release.
Insider factors out that smaller regional airways have been hit exhausting by the pandemic. A scarcity of demand has pushed down income and prompted many small operators to shut up store.
