Let’s take a look at Santa Barbara to Las Vegas in more detail. Most of these routes have double daily service to allow for day trips. The difference is that Contour is trying to actually operate in business markets. Fly cheap airplanes with low ownership costs on unserved routes. Unlike JSX, Contour’s strategy is to fly on routes with no service today. With Phoenix to Page on the map, the airline could start connecting all the dots. Crescent City to Oakland was extended further down the coast and then over to Vegas. The first build-up of non-EAS routes began in the west. The spread of routes always concerns me, but for an airline that handles much of its own maintenance and does charters, it’s less of an issue operationally. It has expanded from there into a variety of EAS markets all over the country. If you look at the airline’s route map, you can pretty quickly see which routes are EAS-supported.Ĭontour got its start flying from Nashville (near its Smyrna home) to Tupelo. Like Southern Air Express, Contour has opted to build its network on top of the government’s Essential Air Service (EAS) program and then expand from there.
As long as Contour keeps its airplanes with 30 seats or less, then it can operate this way. Consequently, Contour can actually recruit seasoned captains who were forced out of the big guys due to age while also getting its pick of the litter of first officers with limited time. They can have less than 1,500 hours and they can be older than 65. See, Part 135 operators do not have the same restrictions on pilot recruitment. Part 135 is the only way to run a small airline these days, because it is the only way an airline can actually find pilots. This is the same thing JSX (formerly JetSuiteX) has done, but unlike JSX, Contour isn’t investing in making the airplane fancy inside. Having only 30 seats means Contour could fly under FAA Part 135 instead of FAA Part 121. It’s not often that I advocate for an airline to chart a path to success by reducing density, but this is a special exception. Unlike Via, Contour wisely decided to operate all of these airplanes with only 30 seats onboard. It also has acquired EMB-145s since the economics aren’t much different despite being slightly larger. Nobody wants an EMB-135 anymore, and that meant Contour could pick them up for nothing. These airplanes were great for one reason… they were dirt cheap. But it was just a few years back that it decided to get into the game on its own as an airline under the Contour brand.Ĭontour picked the Embraer 135 as its aircraft of choice. You may have heard the name when it was actually operating aircraft for both Glo and OneJet. CFM has been around for decades with a focus on maintenance and charter work. You might recognize the name Corporate Flight Management. In a phone interview, the CEO Matt Chaifetz told me that after a couple short years, the airline is now profitable.īut Contour didn’t start as an airline in the traditional sense. That’s a long list of airlines with few successes, but Contour actually has taken the bits of pieces of each that might lend themselves to a sustainable future. Who are these guys? And will they be able to succeed where so many others have failed?Ĭontour is really a combination of strategies employed by Via Air, Southern Air Express, JSX, Expressjet, Allegiant, and even OneJet. I briefly mentioned Contour Airlines a couple weeks back, but now it’s time to really dive in. Just remember when you read about pilot shortages that this was written before things fell apart. But I still think the underlying information is interesting, so here’s the second one. Once the wheels fell off the industry almost overnight, these posts seemed, at best, out-of-date. So, instead of going dark on the blog, I’m publishing two posts that I was working on back in March.
As I mentioned last Thursday, it’s been a really difficult few months, and I need a couple days to recharge.
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