Roughly once a year, I visit the St. Louis, Missouri area. Lacking any real airport competition, I haven’t found prices to be particularly competitive. On the plus side, that also means I get to be creative with checking off new airlines and airports. Enter, Southern Airways Express.
Southern Airways Express is one of the larger commuter airlines (i.e. one using small aircraft like the Cessna 208 Caravan) in the United States, with focuses on the Midwest, South, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Southwest, and Hawaii. They’re all about the government-subsidized routes — aka Essential Air Service — but they also offer charter flights.
In this case, I discovered that Southern Airways Express has up to two daily flights between Chicago O’Hare (ORD) and Quincy, Illinois (UIN). FYI, Quincy also has service to St. Louis (STL), operated by the same carrier.
According to the airline’s website, all of their flights out of Chicago leave from Terminal 2, gate F4.
By gum, they were correct:
Since I was transferring through Chicago, I had to check-in at the gate. Check-in consisted of the customer service agent requesting my weight (that’s how seats were assigned), and telling me to be back at the gate by 12 for the 12:30 flight. Most importantly, right before boarding, he reminded us that there were no lavatories onboard the aircraft. Whoops.
By the way, there were no snacks/drinks either, so you may want to think about having a bite beforehand.
At around 12:20, the three other passengers and I took an elevator to ground level, then walked over to the Cessna 208 Caravan:
Upon boarding, a co-pilot and the customer service agent from earlier helped store our larger bags in the hold, then gave us our seats.
One of the co-pilots gave us a brief safety demonstration, and proceeded to inform us that the flight would be around one (1) hour, 45 minutes. Amazingly, we didn’t even have to queue for departure.
Although I accidentally left my reading material in the checked luggage, I lucked out with rather clear weather:
The flight landed in Quincy about 10 minutes early.
After grabbing my luggage, I awaited my ride in the anachronistic and clean airport terminal:
All in all, it was an on-time departure, early arrival, and a good, mostly smooth flight. For a commuter route leaving from one of the world’s busiest airports during wintertime, that’s hard to beat.
Fun and interesting article about a place that is a long drive from everywhere! Thanks for sharing!
A former Illinoian