Houghton County Airport Awaiting SkyWest

Yesterday on UGN News, we mentioned some changes coming to Marquette County’s airport.

But Sawyer Airport isn’t the only one awaiting some service changes.

Houghton County Memorial Airport in Calumet has even less time to wait than Sawyer does.

Mesaba Airlines, which has done business under the name Northwest Airlink, serves the airport right now.

But on March 1st, that’ll change.

SkyWest, a regional carrier for United, will take over.

They’ll run 2 round trips a day to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, which is a change from Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Airport Manager Dennis Hext says while there are always some snags when service transitions from one carrier to another, he thinks this one is going fairly well.

He says SkyWest employees are already at the airport learning their new jobs.

Some passengers with return trips books for after the switch date were redirected to Sawyer Airport, or even to Grand Rapids.

United mistakenly though those were close enough to Houghton to not cause problems.

But he says a Houghton travel agency has done great work with everyone who’s been affected to smooth things out.

Hext also says pricing issues have mainly been worked out, but there’ve been some of those, too.

He wants anyone who’s seeing a big jump in the price of their tickets to either call him at the airport at 482-3970, or e-mail him at dhext@pasty.com .