Comair is a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines based in Erlanger, Kentucky, USA, a city near the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport, which serves Cincinnati, Ohio.

Comair is one of the world's largest regional airlines and, with over $1 billion in annual revenue, would be considered a major airline carrier except for the fact that its aircraft seat less than 100 people. Operating under the brand name Delta Connection, Comair operates passenger services to a large number of destinations in the USA, Canada, Mexico and the Bahamas. .

In late 2006, Comair opened another crew base and hub city at New York's JFK Airport. Comair had the lowest percentage of on time flights of all major U.S. carriers during the late 2006. This was the result of starting operations at JFK, a notoriously congested airport with poor staffing and a poor terminal and aircraft ramp layout that severely dropped Comair's ratings in the FAA listings. During the course of 2007, Comair closed down its crew bases in Greensboro, North Carolina and Orlando, Florida (for the 2nd time). Parent company Delta Air Lines replaced Comair's service in these destinations with Atlantic Southeast Airlines, a subsidiary of SkyWest, Inc., and Chautauqua Airlines, a subsidiary of Republic Airways Holdings. In early 2008, Delta announced it was going to reduce its domestic capacity by 4-5%, in which Comair will reduce its 50-seat Canadair Regional Jet fleet by 8-14 aircraft. In March 2008, when oil reached over $110 per barrel (see Oil price increases since 2003), Delta announced it would further reduce domestic capacity. As of this writing, it has yet to be determined how this would affect Comair.

History

The airline was established in March 1977 and started operations in April 1977. It was founded by Patrick J. Sowers, Robert T. Tranter, David Mueller and his father Raymond in Cincinnati and began scheduled services with two Piper Navajo aircraft. Under its parent Comair Holdings, it became a public company in July 1981 to support the growth and capital requirements to upgrade their fleet. It became a Delta Connection carrier in 1984. In July 1986 Delta Air Lines acquired 20% of Comair stock. Delta Air Lines acquired full ownership on 22 October 1999 at a cost of over 2 billion dollars.

On March 26, 2001, Comair's pilots went on strike. The strike cancelled the airline's flights and grounded its fleet. The strike ended after a new contract was agreed to 89 days later. Comair came to nationwide attention in the United States during Christmas 2004 when it cancelled all of its 1,160 flights for Saturday December 25 and Sunday December 26, stranding 30,000 people, many of them never reaching their destination for the holidays. The reason was a twofold combination of record snow and crew scheduling software flaw. On December 23 and 24, a record snowfall hit the Cincinnati area, forcing the airline to deplete its entire supply of deicing solution. With the area highways closed due to the blizzard, no additional deicing fluid could be delivered to the airport, and Comair was forced to cancel all flights beginning on Friday December 24. After receiving necessary supplies overnight, the airline began the process of startup when the computer system that handled flight crew assignments shut down. It had been designed with a hard coded limit of changes for a month, which were far exceeded due to the poor weather in the prior days. The software, ironically, had been in the process of being phased out at the airline in favor of a new system with more capabilities. However, as of May 2008 the original scheduling software has not been replaced. Comair's parent company Delta Air Lines, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 14, 2005, forcing Comair into bankruptcy along with it. Comair announced that would cut costs by $70 million annually. These savings were achieved by aircraft, flight, and employee reductions.