Great Lakes Airlines Ceases Scheduled Service

Cheyenne, Wyoming-based Great Lakes Airlines ceased operating scheduled flights at midnight on Monday, following several years of declining service capacity. The company has not entered bankruptcy, however, and said it will continue to support scheduled service between Denver and Pierre and Watertown, South Dakota, by Aerodynamics Inc. (ADI), which flies Embraer ERJ-145s as Great Lakes Jet Express.

Great Lakes, which flew as a code-share partner of United Airlines, became an early casualty of a 2013 rule that required Part 121 first officers to have flown at least 1,500 hours, exacerbating a pilot shortage that had already stunted the growth of the regional airline industry in the U.S. By the time the Regional Airline Association held its annual convention in St. Louis in May 2014, the airline saw the size of its pilot group shrink from 308 to 98 over the course of a year.

Consequently, the airline needed to find some creative ways to compensate for the loss, shutting down 17 cities between July 2013 and May 2014 and going as far as to prevent access to 10 seats in half of the company’s Beech 1900 turboprops, effectively turning them into nine-seaters and allowing their operation under FAA Part 135 rules. By July that year Great Lakes converted all of its Beech 1900s to the nine-seat configuration and its B1900 fleet shrunk from 28 to 17. Of the six Embraer Brasilias in its fleet, it flew only two.