SIOUX CITY -- SkyWest Airlines flight 5146, the first direct flight from Denver to Sioux City in six years, arrived at the Sioux Gateway Airport at around 4:47 p.m. Wednesday, about 17 minutes behind schedule. It was greeted by a ceremonial water-cannon salute from the 185th ARW fire department.

City and airport dignitaries spoke before the airplane touched down Wednesday, and Mayor Bob Scott didn't mince words on the importance of people booking flights.

"I would encourage our citizens -- this is one of those deals, we either use it or we lose it, guys," Scott said. "And it's important that we fly out of Sioux City, it's important that we use this airline when we're going west or anywhere, that they fly. Because it's critical that we keep good air service in this community."

Sioux Gateway had been without flights to and from Denver since October 2014, when low-cost carrier Frontier Airlines halted the service after just four months. In the 1990s, United Airlines offered daily connecting flights to Denver. City officials had hoped for some time to re-establish flights to the west.

The city's transportation services agreement with SkyWest, which is flying United Express-branded flights, runs until Feb. 28, 2022.

Steven Reff and his wife, Jill, were among the passengers stepping off that first flight Wednesday. The Tucson, Arizona residents have relatives in Holstein, Iowa, who they visit a few times each year. They were pleasantly surprised on this trip to find a flight landing them much closer to their destination.

"We used to fly into Omaha, and then we saw this flight. Didn't even know it was the inaugural flight," said Steven Reff.

"It makes it so much easier than renting a car, out of Omaha, and driving up," he added.

They flew from Tucson to Denver, then from Denver to Sioux City. The Sioux City-to-Denver leg of their flight was roughly an hour or maybe a bit longer, Reff said.

Thirty-six people flew into SUX on that first flight in, while around 26 people -- including airport board of trustees president Dave Bernstein and other Sioux Gateway officials -- flew from Sioux Gateway to Denver Wednesday evening.

Prior to Wednesday, Sioux Gateway was back down to once-a-day flights, airport director and assistant city manager Mike Collett said last week.

The airport offered only one flight a day this spring, after air travel slumped due to the pandemic. By the summer, they had resumed two or three flights a day, before reverting back to one in August.

Bernstein briefly addressed the ongoing issue with American Airlines, which announced in August its intention to stop flying to Sioux Gateway in October, due to the catastrophic impact of COVID-19 on the airline industry. The airline backtracked a few days later, delaying its plan to suspend its flights to Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Then, at the end of August, American filed to terminate unsubsidized service to Sioux City, under the Essential Air Service (EAS) program with the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Sioux Gateway is covered by the federal EAS program, which was created in 1978 to ensure that smaller communities maintained at least a minimal level of air service. The airport successfully used EAS protections to preserve Sioux City's air service when Delta Air Lines pulled out of the market years ago.

The DOT has asked for bids on subsidized flights to the Sioux Gateway Airport under the EAS program.

"The bids should be back by early next month, or late this month. And then, the DOT will go through their process of understanding and issuing the results, and then they'll come to us ultimately, and ask us for preference, for both what destination we prefer, and what carrier, potentially," Bernstein said.

"We believe we're going to see a robust bidding process," he added.

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