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August 25, 2008 Newsworthy

Cleared for takeoff | David Fernald's New England Air Transport readies regular air service between northern Maine and Portland

photo/david fernald jr. Fly high: David Fernald saw the untapped demand for rural air service after managing a regional airport in Frenchville
By Stephen Doane

In this age of cell phones, email and video conferencing, distance is often a nonfactor for companies. But David Fernald believes that no number of virtual meetings or conference calls will ever replace a face to face encounter.

This August, Fernald and his son, David Jr. — founders of New England Air Transport, an on-demand air charter company based in Frenchville — will help bring business people together with the launch of regular air service between the Aroostook County towns of Frenchville and Presque Isle, and Portland. The flights, Fernald says, will be an asset to small businesses in both northern and southern Maine. “Northern Maine businesses are smaller in size, but they would get the same benefit from flying as larger companies,” he says.

Fernald recognized the need to re-establish an intrastate air charter service when he began managing Frenchville’s Northern Aroostook County Airport in April 2001. There hadn’t been chartered flights from the region for several years, and Fernald believed there was enough demand from both Maine’s rural northern communities and the state’s commercial centers in the south to give an ambitious entrepreneur some lift. And when no one stepped up to fill the void, Fernald realized the chance was all his. “If it was going to happen I’d have to be the one to do it,” he says.

Two years ago, Fernald launched an on-demand charter service, which carried passengers who had booked the service in advance. The fee? Roughly $2,000 to fly to Portland. Now, Fernald says demand for those southern Maine flights has reached the point where NEAT can offer regularly scheduled flights. The flights, which are scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays, will be available to anyone who pays the round-trip fare of roughly $300.

For the passenger, Fernald believes a regular service has several benefits over on-demand flights. “Being able to share the cost with five, six, seven people, it makes flying very attractive,” he says.

Fernald’s biggest marketing tool is money. Driving to Portland from Presque Isle can take five hours, but a NEAT flight gets passengers there in 90 minutes. “They usually drive,” says Fernald about business travelers in Maine. “Small businesses can’t foot a $2,000 bill, even if it would greatly benefit them.”

Through direct-mail market surveys completed this spring by NEAT, Fernald learned what groups would be interested in regular flights from northern to southern Maine. Businesses were at the top of that list, followed by patients in northern Maine flying south to receive specialized medical care, and leisure and vacation travelers. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the anticipated flying days, but, Fernald says, if demand is up by mid-October they may add Wednesday to the schedule. “The majority said they wanted to leave early in the morning and be home by early evening,” says Fernald.

Fernald recently sent mailings to residents in northern and southern Maine, and is planning several marketing events to spread the word this fall about the new flights. “We’re in a full-court press to promote the start-up,” he says.

Fernald figures that NEAT can turn a decent profit if the company can fly its newly acquired twin-engine Piper Chieftain — which it bought for $225,000 and is spending $175,000 to retrofit in Oklahoma — at least 1,000 hours a year. And for each hour of flight time, Fernald hopes to bring in $600 in revenue to cover fuel and repair costs while still leaving a profit of roughly 10%.

If NEAT exceeds these expectations, Fernald says he may extend the service into more rural Maine communities and even Canada. For right now, however, Fernald’s biggest challenge is getting people onboard. “We just want to do everything we can to make folks go for it,” he says.

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