Failed Startups..

[T-Bird76]

This is a really good read of a good portion of the airlines that started up from deregulation and failed.

http://www.aviationplanning.com/Star...ilures2011.htm

[LGA777]

Fun trip down memory lane, surprised the writer left out 2 of my former employers, both were larger (though not large) than many of the mentioned carriers. Northeastern and Florida Express.

[NIKV69]

Skybus lol. Ohmy was that good.

[Cary]

Eastwind
A 737 operator that started with service from Trenton, where there was no competition. No traffic, either. It then became an airline nomad - moving from place to place trying to find a reason to exist.
Moved offices to Greensboro. No success there. Tried service at Rochester, NY, an airport in a region screaming about a need for low fare carriers. The noise must have come from a rent-a-mob, because Eastwind couldn't find enough passengers to fill a VW Microbus and pulled the Rochester plug. After thrashing around various routes from Greensboro, the airline finally shut down.

This isn't a very good account of Eastwind. Traffic was fine at Trenton. The only issues with TTN, were the short runway and the small terminal - but they managed to get a lot of pax in and out of there efficiently. The downfall of Eastwind was buying two brand-new 73Gs, customer service fiascoes after moving to Greensboro, and the uncommanded rudder incident, which took a 732 out of service for quite a while.

[Mateo]

I never had the chance to, but I knew a lot of people that flew Eastwind when they were around. Agree with the above; they got the traffic, but the County dicked around with the terminal expansion EIS for so long that Eastwind refocused their strategy around GSO and then went bust. (WN also stopped considering TTN once it became clear the terminal was never going to expand.) The strip at TTN is 6000, but they were flying short stages, so it's not like the 73Gs would have been going out at MTOW.

Fun fact: the signs that point to TTN were put up during the Eastwind era, and so the airplane picture is a fairly detailed 732.