[kylehotchkiss]

It's all connecting to bigger flights. Plus 78-119 miles means either paying a lot of money for a cab, paying gas & parking fees for the duration of your trip at the bigger airport, or asking a friend/family member very nicely to take that trip to drop you off/pick you up. The smaller cities in question for these routes aren't going to have any sort of usable bus service for making a flight on time.

To answer your cargo question: probably not much. The distance is within a normal delivery range of some rural UPS/Fedex/DHL routes. Making people in these smaller cities go to the airport to pick up boxes just makes a lot of work for them.

source: my own experience taking loud proppy planes between Roanoke VA to Charlotte, NC to connect to a larger flight

[Aardwolf]

> Plus 78-119 miles means either paying a lot of money for a cab, paying gas & parking fees for the duration of your trip at the bigger airport, or asking a friend/family member very nicely to take that trip to drop you off/pick you up.

How about trains for those distances?

[closeparen]

A small city would be essentially destroying its own airport by authorizing a convenient rail connection to a nearby bigger city’s airport.

Example: there is a train between Milwaukee and Chicago and it stops at MKE, but it will never stop at O’Hare, because that would be the end of MKE.

Technically you can take the Blue Line from O’Hare to downtown, making dozens of local stops, and then walk a few blocks with your luggage to Union Station, but by the time you get downtown you could be in Milwaukee already on a connecting flight. And those few outdoor blocks are a big deal in winter, dragging soft sided luggage through the slush is not fun.

[bserge]

Track/engine building and maintenance is probably more expensive than airports and planes.

[choeger]

This. People tend to grossly underestimate the expense and effort to build new rail tracks in an industrialized country. Most land is owned by someone already, there are environmental concerns, other (rail-)roads and generally obstacles must be crossed, and -worst of all- you have to repeat the process basically for every single town you want to connect.

Side remark: The same holds for roads, of course, with the notable caveat that roads form a flexible network automatically. Planes are just superlinear in their flexibility: If you have n airports and add one more, you get n new connections.

[GravitasFailure]

A a route that serves a few hundred passengers a day is also potentially profitable for an airline while a train would likely not be unless there's existing infrastructure that can be leveraged. Also, if nobody needs that route to be served any more, just send the plane elsewhere.

Edit: I'm an idiot and missed that these are 19 seat planes. No, a train that only serves 19 people a day, one way, has a zero percent chance of being profitable, and I doubt it even makes environmental sense if you have to lay 70 miles of track to support it.

[Symbiote]

For 19 people on a 100-mile route, they may as well schedule a bus.

(For example, my parents would take a direct bus a similar distance to Heathrow or several other airports. It saves parking costs and driving while tired.)

[freeone3000]

No, this is America.

[topkai22]

Also there are a fair number of smaller cities that have physical obstacles (mountains, bodies of water) between them and a major airport. I used to fly with a connection between Chicago and Grand Rapids, MI regularly. That's a 50 minute, 220km flight, or a 3 hour 315 km drive (assuming no traffic). Plus, embarking/disembarking at a smaller airport lowers total time as well.

I actually think you the cargo aspect will be somewhat significant as well- The regional airports I checkout on flightaware appear to have several fedex/UPS feeder flights a day.

[mason55]

And it’s usually much nicer checking in at the smaller regional airports. Less chaotic and shorter lines.

Downside is that the services aren’t usually nearly as good.

[kylehotchkiss]

And the two TSA agents only have an older X-Ray machine and no big backscatter machine to whisk the short line through!