Cincinnati's Airport Is In Dayton

In a few hours, I will be driving up to Dayton so I can catch a flight back down to Cincinnati before heading on to San Francisco. I know that sounds ludicrous, but with how expensive it is to fly directly out of Cincinnati (which has the highest average ticket prices of any airport in the country), it saves me about $300 in airfare. That makes it worth it, especially when you consider that I live about as far from the Dayton airport (just north of the city) as I do from the Cincinnati airport (which is in Northern Kentucky).

But my question is this- who flies from Dayton to Cincinnati for a reason other than to catch another flight going somewhere else? Is anyone really flying just to cover the 50-some miles that separate the two cities? I'm guessing no. So the only people making this flight are people like me- people who want the destinations (and direct flights) out of Cincinnati but who don't want to pay the price to fly out of Cincinnati. Everyone making the 40 minute flight (seriously, a 40 minute flight?) from DAY to CVG is doing so simply to save money because CVG is so damn expensive. And everyone knows this. The people in Dayton know this; I'm sure they welcome the increased business. The people in Cincinnati know this; but they just seem to be standing around with their heads up their assess, watching all the local travellers abandon them for other nearby airports and not doing anything about it.

I wonder how things would have been different if instead of building the Cincinnati airport in Covington, KY, they built it in Monroe or Middletown, OH, or somewhere else in between Cincinnati and Dayton. Instead of having the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport, we'd have the Cincinnati-Dayton Airport. That could have paved the way to eventually linking the two cities metropolitan areas (kind of like Dallas-Fort Worth, only smaller), which is something that is bandied about everytime people look at how fast Dayton and the areas north of Cincinnati (like West Chester) are growing.

But that didn't happen, which means I'll be stuck making the tedious flight from Dayton to Cincinnati every time I'm looking to fly somewhere. Hopefully CVG does something to lower its airfare, but I'm not holding my breath. To Dayton!