To have! Airlines close after less than a year

Bad news if you need it to travel to a of America‘s smaller airports. Insider reports the regional airline To have! has declared bankruptcy and closed down. The move comes less than a year after the airline was launched, and a little over a month after that was called “the fastest growing regional airline in the western United States.”

To have! was born of the pandemic. After ExpressJet, one of the oldest regional airlines in the country, applied for Bankruptcy in autumn 2020, aha! was founded out of the ashes just over a year later.

Using small 50-seat Embraer aircraft, the airline connected smaller regional airports in the western United States for point-to-point journey. If you needed to get somewhere like Bakersfield (god knows why anyone needs to fly into Bakersfield) or Eugene, Oregon, Aha! was your airline.

But ongoing global problems beckoned the death knell for the company. In a prepared statement, Managing Director Subodh Karnik so a “combination of circumstances” led to the airline filing for bankruptcy and cease operations immediately. Among them: rising fuel costs, lack of aircraft availability and pilot shortages. “Despite the valiant efforts of our employees to overcome challenges, and despite great support from our cities and airports – especially Reno-Tahoe and the community there, we came to a point where closing operations was in the best interest of our stakeholders, Karnik said in a statement.

Insider psalves out that smaller regional airlines have been hit hard by the pandemic. Lack of demand has driven down profits and caused many small operators to close the shop.