Call For CNMI Leaders To Fight Back On High Airfares
The former representative shared his frustration after attempting to book a four-day roundtrip ticket from Guam to Saipan. Mark Rabago, RNZ Pacific Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas correspondent
Former Northern Mariana Islands lawmaker Edwin K. Propst taken to social media to urge leaders to 'go to war' with United Airlines over what he claims are exorbitant airfares between Saipan and Guam.
The call to action comes amid renewed efforts to reinstate the Essential Air Service program in the CNMI and push for a cabotage exemption.
'Attention all leaders of the Marianas in the public and private sector, it is time to go to war with this airline,' Propst wrote.
The former representative, who now works at the CNMI broadband policy and development office, shared his frustration after attempting to book a four-day roundtrip ticket from Guam to Saipan in June – to find the lowest available fare was US$767.
'For a 25-minute flight?!
'They have just made record-breaking profits and instead of rewarding their customers, they increase their prices.'
Propst called the airfares 'devastating' to the local economy and tourism.
The CNMI is currently seeking exemption from federal cabotage restrictions, which bar foreign airlines from operating domestic routes between US territories such as Guam and the CNMI.
Governor Arnold Palacios mentioned this effort during his State of the Commonwealth Address, saying he had 'actively advocated for potential cabotage waiver [and] essential air services' in recent talks with federal agencies and congressional leaders.
Palacios emphasized the importance of improved regional connectivity to support the CNMI's tourism-dependent economy.
Senate public utilities, transportation and communications committee chair, Senator Jude Hofschneider called Propst's complaints a 'sad reality of economic times,' adding that United's pricing is 'likely a business decision by the air carrier'.
Still, Hofschneider said the moment calls for greater support of Congresswoman Kimberlyn King-Hinds' bill introduced in April to requalify CNMI airports for the Essential Air Service (EAS) program. If passed, the measure would allow federal subsidies to fund daily round-trip flights even if commercial carriers withdraw service.
A quote from CWM Travel International showed a Saipan-Guam roundtrip departing 8 June 8 and returning 12 June costing $420 – significantly cheaper than Propst's booking but still high for an inter-island flight.
The EAS program, created in 1978 and stripped from CNMI eligibility in 2012, was intended to preserve air access for small US communities.
King-Hinds' bill seeks to restore eligibility to Saipan, Tinian, and Rota by placing CNMI alongside Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico in exemption status.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
3 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
'Brought to its knees': Why NZ can't shake the recession
By Susan Edmunds of RNZ New Zealanders were told to "survive til '25" for the economy to pick up - but now one major bank economist says it's probably going to be 2026 before any real improvement happens. Kiwibank's latest Annual Regional Note shows small improvements across the country, but weak scores overall. The national average score has lifted from three out of 10 to four. Southland and Otago top the table at five. Otago was boosted by a recovery in international tourism and improvement in employment. Northland, Taranaki and Gisborne went backwards. Taranaki had the biggest fall in employment of anywhere in the country, at 8 percent. Northland reported a double-digit drop in building consents. Retail sales remain below their average levels over the past decade in most regions, as weak household confidence weighs on consumption. Kiwibank said Wellington recorded the steepest annual decline at a -3.3 percent, while regions like Waikato, Northland and the Bay of Plenty experienced a slight improvement on last year. 'Wellington is just more pessimistic' Wellington's score improved from a two out of 10 to a three out of 10 while Auckland lifted from a three to four. "Wellington is just more pessimistic," Kiwibank chief economist Jarrod Kerr said. "It's gone through a lot in recent years. You can see it in their activity, you can see it in the housing market. You can see it in the economy, the city has been brought to its knees and it's been struggling to shake the pessimistic vibe." He said both Auckland and Wellington were well below average. "If you look across the regions, some of them have gone backwards and others are improving but it's not good. "When you look at the South Island things are better, people are definitely more optimistic in the South Island but even then the top scoring regions get a five out of 10." He said the report helped solidify the view that rate cuts to date had not been enough to turn around the economy. "We're really crawling out of this recession rather than regaining our footing and looking to grow from here. We're still struggling across the entire country." He said Kiwibank customers last year had talked about needing to hold on until this year. "We are halfway through the year and, yes, things are better but only by a little bit." Worse off than Australia New Zealand was worse off than Australia, he said. "Their economy is much stronger than ours but in their terms it's soft… where everything washes out is the labour market and, you know, the unemployment rate tells you a lot. Our unemployment rate is over 5 percent and theirs is pretty close to 4 percent." Part of the reason was the more aggressive interest rate hikes from the Reserve Bank, he said. "We were much more aggressive in our rate hikes than in Australia. We were much more aggressive on inflation than across the Tasman. "I think both the RBA and RBNZ made mistakes as I think every central bank did through the Covid period, we overstimulated in hindsight but at the time it was the right thing to do. And then we had to deal with the inflation problem." He said the Reserve Bank had kept the official cash rate at 5.5 percent for too long as it worked to tackle inflation. "We had a really bad recession last year, which the Reserve Bank openly orchestrated, they said 'look, we need a recession to get inflation back down'. The Australians didn't orchestrate a recession, they didn't slam the economy into the floor." Kerr said recovery was still coming but he had hoped it would have started more obviously by now. "We're hoping it takes off in the second half of this year as more and more people refix on to lower rates. Then it's more of a 2026 story now."
RNZ News
4 hours ago
- RNZ News
Latest from the U.S
crime world 27 minutes ago A senior justice department official in the US has met with Jeffrey Esptein's long-time associate Ghislaine Maxwell. She's in prison for sex-trafficking for the disgraced financier. It came as reports emerged this week that US President Donald Trump's name appears in the Epstein Files.
RNZ News
4 hours ago
- RNZ News
SpaceX seeks cause of Starlink's global satellite network outage
Starlink is a satellite internet provider. Photo: 123RF SpaceX's Starlink satellite network was back up and running on Friday (local time) as engineers hunted for the root cause of one of its biggest international outages the night before, a rare disruption for the powerful internet system set off by an internal software failure. Users in the US and Europe began experiencing the outage at around 3pm EDT Thursday (7am NZST Friday), according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made. In Ukraine, where troops rely heavily on Starlink for battlefield communications, the outage affected combat operations as service was "down across the entire front", said Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine's drone forces. Starlink, active in roughly 140 countries and territories and used by a growing number of militaries and government agencies, is a key source of revenue for Elon Musk's SpaceX. The network has grown rapidly since 2020 into a disruptive force in the satellite communications industry. Starlink acknowledged the outage on its X account on Thursday and said "we are actively implementing a solution." The service mostly resumed after two and a half hours, Michael Nicolls, SpaceX vice president of Starlink Engineering, wrote on X. By 8pm, the company wrote on X that the "network issue has been resolved, and Starlink service has been restored". "The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network," Nicolls said, apologising for the disruption and vowing to find its cause. Musk also apologised: "Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn't happen again," the SpaceX chief executive wrote on X. The outage was a rare hiccup for SpaceX's most commercially sensitive business. Experts speculated whether the service, known for its resilience and speedy development, was beset by a glitch, a botched software update or perhaps a cyberattack. Doug Madory, an expert at the internet analysis firm Kentik, said such a sweeping global outage was unusual. "This is likely the longest outage ever for Starlink, at least while it became a major service provider," Madory said. As Starlink amasses more than 6 million users, SpaceX has focused in recent months on updating its network to accommodate demands for higher speed and bandwidth. The company, in a partnership with T-Mobile, is also expanding the constellation with larger, more powerful satellites to offer direct-to-cell text messaging services, a line of business in which mobile phone users can send emergency text messages through the network in rural areas. SpaceX has launched more than 8000 Starlink satellites since 2020, building a uniquely distributed network in low-Earth orbit that has attracted intense demand from militaries, transportation industries and consumers in rural areas with poor access to traditional, fiber-based internet. "I'd speculate this is a bad software update, not entirely dissimilar to the CrowdStrike mess with Windows last year, or a cyberattack," said Gregory Falco, director of a space and cybersecurity laboratory at Cornell University. An update to CrowdStrike's widely used cybersecurity software led to worldwide flight cancellations and impacted industries around the globe in July last year. The outage disrupted internet services, affecting 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices. It was unclear whether Thursday's outage affected SpaceX's other satellite-based services that rely on the Starlink network. Starshield, the company's military satellite business unit, has billions of dollars' worth of contracts with the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies. Separately, Reuters reported on Friday that Musk ordered a partial shutdown of Starlink during a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory in its war with Russia in late September 2022. - Reuters
