Flight schedule changes coming to Cape Girardeau Regional Airport

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (KFVS) - If you fly to Chicago out of Cape Girardeau, your time of departure may be affected. Due to pandemic-related challenges, Cape’s airline charter service SkyWest is reducing its flights.

“I would suggest to people is just to be patient while we’re trying to overcome the challenges,” Airport manager Katrina Amos said.

Amos says the schedule changes are due to a robust hiring process and pilot shortage.

“With Covid-19 coming on in 2020 and there were some early retirements that happened with pilots,” she said. “With the legacy carriers, the United’s the Deltas, the larger airlines, they’ve experienced it at a higher degree.”

This leaves pilots at smaller airlines to take their places resulting in flight schedule reductions.

“We normally have 12 weekly flights. But we’ve been reduced to 10. So, we didn’t lose a lot of our schedule, but we did lose 2 pretty important flights,” she said.

Which is why she asked for the public to be patient as the airport works to overcome a short-term problem.

“We don’t anticipate this going beyond 6 months. I think for the next couple of months were going to monitor and hopefully we can get back to normal. This is an attempt to make sure we have reliable service without cancellations.”

Amos says the key to having more flights is getting more people to become pilots so, she’s thankful that SEMO is help leading the way with their aviation program.

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