Gregory Polek has spent his entire career in aviation journalism with AIN, starting as a proofreader and assistant to then-managing editor Mary Mahoney in 1995 after serving an internship with&nbsp;New Jersey Monthly&nbsp;magazine and completing his B.A. degree in English/Writing at New Jersey’s William Paterson College. By 1997 Polek accepted a position as an associate editor, covering the regional airline beat for&nbsp;Aviation International News&nbsp;in place of retiring industry veteran Don Anderson. The assignment took Polek across North America and Europe to profile regional airlines varying in size and mission from the likes of floatplane operators Kenmore Air and Chalk’s Ocean Airways to regional jet operators such as SkyWest and American Eagle. Today, in his dual role as Air Transport Editor and International Airshow Editor, Polek writes, edits, and manages AIN’s commercial aviation content while overseeing each of the company’s daily international air show publications in Paris, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai. Most recently Polek has assumed oversight of daily coverage of the Helicopter Association International’s annual Heli-Expo convention.

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Minneapolis-based regional carrier and Trans States Holdings subsidiary Compass Airlines will completely shut down on April 7, when code-share partner American Airlines removes its entire regional operation from Los Angeles. The memo to employees explaining the reasons for the closure comes days after CEO Rick Leach communicated that St. Louis-based Trans States Airlines would accelerate its previously planned drawdown of operations and close on April 1. An earlier communique from Leach to Compass’s employees had revealed the ending of all the airline’s Delta Air Lines contract flying at the end of this month due to capacity cuts associated with the Covid-19 crisis.

 


Last week American told Compass that it would have to absorb a 14 percent cut to its capacity in April. However, the Dallas-based major airline also said it would probably need to make more cuts.

 


“We are now faced with two insurmountable obstacles,” wrote Leach in Thursday’s memo. “All our remaining capacity will be completely cut for an undetermined period and our other, once viable, opportunities have been tabled for the foreseeable future due to the sweeping impact of this crisis. These challenges, combined with the fact that our American contract would begin to reach its natural conclusion later this year, have forced us to make the incredibly difficult decision to pull down the Compass operation in conjunction with the temporary wind-down of American’s regional operation in Los Angeles. We simply cannot keep an infrastructure in place without guarantees, nor clarity of additional flying to support it.”

 


Leach has cited moves by U.S. major airlines to shift aircraft among their partners to simplify and create “critical mass” among fleet types and reduce geographic overlap of flying as a major reason for financial distress within the regional industry at large. United Airlines, for one, continues to consolidate and restructure 50-seat jet flying among its various regional affiliates, most recently announcing a major fleet addition at its ExpressJet partner.

 


The Compass closure now marks the third failure of a regional airline since the spread of the Covid-19 virus into Europe and North America. By the time Leach announced the closure of Trans States Airlines, the UK’s Flybe had already stopped all flying on March 5. Compass operates 32 Embraer E175s, 12 as Delta Connection and 20 as American Eagle. Delta plans to transfer Compass’s airplanes to Indianapolis-based Republic Airways and American plans to send the 20 jets Compass flew out of Los Angeles to Envoy Air. &nbsp;

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News and issues relating to the aerospace industry that are related to the science, engineering and business of flight in space involving civil, industrial and military applications, and similar topics related to flight in the atmosphere of the Earth that are not covered more directly by other AINonline subject channels. In other words, both astronautical and aeronautical subjects, except for those aeronautical topics that are specifically covered elsewhere on this website.

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