By James Pilcher
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Cincinnati has always been one of the most expensive places to fly from, but a new index from the federal government shows that increases in local airfares are more than triple the national average.

The index shows how much air travel has increased or decreased quarterly since early 1995. It also provides a separate chart for the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

Comparing the local airport to Dallas/Fort Worth and Minneapolis in a section titled "fortress hubs," the study by the Transportation Department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics showed that the average cost of air travel here has gone up by 17.2 percent between first quarter 1995 and third quarter 2003. Nationally, the cost went up 5.5 percent.

Cincinnati is the second-largest hub for Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, which operates more than 90 percent of the airport's passenger flights. Dallas is American Airlines' largest hub, while Minneapolis is the largest hub for Northwest Airlines.

The report also pointed out that those two cities' average air travel costs have gone up 0.38 percent in Dallas and 0.5 percent in Minneapolis, primarily because low-cost carriers also operate there. No such carrier operates in Cincinnati.

According to the department's separate consumer airfare report, the average fare from Cincinnati in the second quarter of 2003 was $236 per round-trip ticket, compared with a national average of $188. That local figure was down from $244 in the first quarter but up from $225 for the final quarter of 2002.

But the new index also shows that prices as a whole are down from before the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The average cost in Cincinnati was nearly 24 percent higher in the first quarter of 2001 than it was at the beginning of 1995.

E-mail jpilcher@enquirer.com