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Do You Fly Regional Airlines?

We now have one fewer serving Seattle.

Pack your bags, we’re flying to…Yakima?

At their behemoth of a factory in Everett, Boeing makes airplanes that can fly from here to Timbuktu (that’s 7000 miles—the 787 Dreamliner could do it!). But if you want to fly to Wenatchee instead of East Africa, you have to hop a regional plane.

The Seattle P-I reports that one short-haul carrier, SeaPort airlines, has cut its service in the Northwest. It’s stopping Seattle-to-Portland flights, ceasing service altogether from Boeing Field on January 27. That also means no more regular flights to Salem, Astoria, and Newport in Oregon.

You can still fly from Seattle directly to, say, Ganges, BC, or Lopez Island (on Kemore Air), or even directly to Pasco (on Alaska). But would you? Or would you rather drive?

Where would you like to see commercial air service in the Northwest? Right now only private planes can get you to Olympia and Port Townsend. We’d love to see flights to, say, Long Beach, WA, so we could skip the beach traffic, or to Moses Lake—there, the Grant County International Airport has third-longest runway in the country. It’s even an FAA-approved Space Port that was once a former alternate landing site for the space shuttle. That deserves at least a weekly visit from a prop plane.











Allison Williams
Allison Williams
Since joining Seattle Met in 2011, Allison Williams has overseen the magazine’s travel and outdoor coverage, including deep dives into Olympic National Park, the Columbia River, and a Burger King drive-thru in Canada. She edits the travel-focused blog Tripster and contributes service, news, interview, and narrative pieces to the magazine, including long-form features about mountain mysteries and puppies in prison. She’s earned awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and been nominated for a City and Regional Magazine award.  Allison was raised here in Olympia and studied writing at Duke University, Oxford University, Columbia Journalism School, and University of Alaska. She began her career in New York City in the newsrooms of Metro newspaper and Time Out New York, then hightailed it back to her native habitat so she could write guidebooks and climb mountains.