The BBC reports that Aer Lingus, the Irish airline, is preparing to cut 500 jobs – “290 roles in its head office, along with 140 cabin roles and 70 pilot positions” – and eliminate eight flights from Dublin (half of them to the United States) in an effort to maintain its profit margins.
“The airline said it aims to achieve a 12 percent-15 percent operating margin in order to attract investment” by reducing capacity by 6 percent, the BBC reports.
Aer Lingus’ heavily subsidized direct flight to Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) –$5.25 million in taxpayer funds over two years — is not among the flights to be grounded. But given the circumstances, reasonable people might conclude it’s only a matter of time.
How’s that? Well, one of the flights to the U.S. that Aer Lingus is bagging is to Denver. As various media have reported it, the city and county of Denver put up $4 million in public money in an “operational and incentive package” for the nonstop flights at Denver International Airport.
But the two-year incentive expired on May 16. And the flights averaged only 64 percent capacity, reports have it. And Aer Lingus will kill the route in late September. We seriously doubt that’s a coincidence.
Will the Pittsburgh route experience the same fate? When the subsidy runs out, will Aer Lingus run out of PIT? We look forward to seeing what kind of passenger numbers the flights are producing. That is, if the Allegheny County Airport Authority ever releases them.
Again, it’s a reasonable question for reasonable observers to ponder.
Aer Lingus also is eliminating flights to and from Minneapolis, Las Vegas and Seattle.
Media accounts indicate that Minneapolis did not pay Aer Lingus directly for the flights but did offer what’s considered to be “standard marketing and development support.” (Cirium, an aviation analytics company, found that less than 70 percent of the seats were filled over the last two years, dipping to below 35 percent in some months, thriftytraveler.com reported). Flights will end in late October.
In Las Vegas, its Convention and Visitors Authority partnered on a joint marketing campaign. But reports have it that the flights “performed below financial expectations.” Those flights will cease in early December.
And in Seattle, the airport paid Aer Lingus $1.1 million to begin service in 2018, plus waived landing fees for two years and made contributions to a marketing campaign. The flights will be a “summer-only operation” after late October.
And no wonder. U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) data show the Dublin-Seattle route was one of Aer Lingus’ worst-performing U.S. destinations between April 2025 and March 2026 with an average of 50 percent of the seats filled. Just this past February, DOT said only 28.1 percent of the seats were filled.
The Allegheny County Airport Authority is well known for its airline subsidies follies. Think OneJet, Qatar Airways, Delta Air Lines, Condor and WOW Air, among them.
And then there’s those British Airways subsidies that federal data suggest are exporting more travelers and their dollars than importing them, sullying the grand economic “impact” projected of a vast influx of people and money into Greater Pittsburgh.
So do keep December 2027 and May 2028 marked on your calendars. The former will mark the two-year anniversary of the Aer Lingus $5.25 million subsidy announcement at PIT and the latter will mark the two-year anniversary of Aer Lingus’ inaugural flights here.
If Denver is any benchmark, “two and gone” might be repeated here.
And lest we forget this fundamental economics bottom line, as reiterated by Frank Gamrat, executive director of the Allegheny Institute, eight years ago (in Policy Brief Vol. 18, No. 44):
“Propping up business enterprises with public funds is not only a high-risk practice but it represents interference in the marketplace and begets ever more subsidies, undermining the role of markets,” the Ph.D. economist said.
Sadly, tragically, the Allegheny County Airport Authority refuses to heed the lessons of history. And, self-doomed, they keep repeating the mistake.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
