We’re still dealing with bailout, bailout, bailout, though they’re calling it a “rescue plan.” The numbers are absolutely staggering, and I sincerely hope that you’ll take action on your own with your elected representatives.

As the government is bailing out all these other institutions, they’re not paying any attention to airline and travel infrastructure.

And, if they don’t, we won’t have one.

It’s one thing to say OK, we’ll let the free market speak and we’ll let these financial institutions fail or they’ll merge or get bought. But how do they operate? How do they travel? How do they move their executives? If they can’t, there goes the economy.

As more and more airlines are pulling out of cities, or drastically reducing their service, it’s going get nuts. We’ll know that things are really bad when we get to the big “s” word: subsidies.

We’ve already seen it in the Caribbean, where certain airlines have gone down to certain island nations and said, “You want us to continue to fly here? Pony up three, four, five million dollars and we’ll think about it. Because we can make more money by redeploying our aircraft elsewhere.” And some of these countries have actually paid the cash.

What’s going to happen in U.S. cities when that same approach is tried? (And believe me, it’s coming.) This is when local communities need to take action on their own. They need to control this situation or it will control them.

Take a look at the example of Wichita, Kansas. This goes back years, and has nothing to do with oil prices or the current financial meltdown, but rather basic dollars and cents. Wichita had the 14th highest average airfare, paid by people who lived there to travel anywhere. You know what the average was? $425!

So they went to Southwest Airlines and they begged them to fly there.

Southwest gets about 120 applications a year from different cities begging them to fly there. You know how may routes they added last year? None! You know how many they added this year? One!

Well, they didn’t add Wichita either. Southwest studied the market and they realized they already owned 25 percent of that market. Because 25 percent of the people in Wichita were already driving to other airports (ie-Kansas City) that Southwest already flew to within 300 miles of Wichita. So Southwest turned them down.

What did the folks in Wichita do? They went to AirTran and said, we’re going make you an offer you can’t refuse: We’re going to put $3 million into an escrow fund and we’ll have all our businesses and individuals to contribute to it. We’re going to pre-buy a lot of tickets. We’ll guarantee you that we’ll fly AirTran out of Wichita. We’ll guarantee you that each of those flights is at least 66 percent full. And if any of your flights ever drop below 66 percent, you can dip into the fund to make it even.

AirTran studied that for about a nanosecond, and they said “We’re in.” They started flying to Wichita and airfares dropped. That is a model that many other cities need to follow or you will be paying a hefty surcharge.

Last week the shareholders of Northwest and Delta approved the long-planned merger. Now it just has to get over the Justice Department hurdle, which I think in this environment should take no time at all. It will go through and it will create the world’s largest airline.

For those of you living in Minneapolis, you want to tell me how this is going to benefit you? When the new airline is called Delta and based in Atlanta? It’s like what happened with American Airlines in St. Louis. Those folks who used to fly TWA were not very happy when they found out how far Dallas was.

So what’s going to happen to those routes? Right now, the airfare between Minneapolis and Chicago (not a long flight) is more than $400.

But this week there was another crack in the dike. Southwest actually added a new route starting next year. They’ve announced that in March they are going to fly from Chicago Midway to Minneapolis.

Now, I guarantee you two things are going happen: competition on the route, and airfares are going drop. It’s not going to cost $400 anymore to take that little hop.

Point being: This is the kind of stuff you have to stay on top of, or it’s going bite you in the butt BIG TIME.

From Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio …

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