Two years ago I posted an April Fool’s post in which I claimed that United Airlines would be discontinuing service to Bismarck-Mandan because a new competitor, Frontier Airlines, was going to be receiving subsidies to come and compete with them.  Apparently it was an entirely plausible idea, because a lot of people bought it.  Gotcha.  Well, it turns out that my satirical post was prescient in at least one way.

In the last paragraph of the post, I pointed out that the same thing happened in Fargo, where Frontier operated for the same two years, then left despite the incentives that city had provided:

Ironically, Frontier Airlines pulled out of Fargo in 2010 after only two years of being “touted as a low-cost carrier that would bring down fares at Fargo’s Hector International Airport” (Associated Press, 2/5/10). Flaweigh surmised, “Once that happens in Bismarck, maybe the City of Bismarck will consider offering United a ‘break-even guarantee’ and some other concessions as they are currently offering our competitors.

Here we are, two years later, and Frontier is doing the two-year two-step. I guess any consternation at throwing $250,000 and other incentives at them doesn’t seem so unreasonable after all. But if a simple photo blogger like me could have seen this coming, why couldn’t any of the local geniuses have done the same?