Passengers disembark the afternoon flight of Boutique Airlines in May 2018 at the Eastern Oregon Regional Airport in Pendleton.

A change to Boutique Air’s schedule came as a surprise to regular passengers and the Pendleton airport administration alike.

A few weeks ago, Dave Conant-Norville was notified that his Tuesday flight from Portland to Pendleton would be switched from 8:05 a.m. to 10:05 a.m. as a part of a permanent schedule change.

A licensed psychiatrist, Conant-Norville ran a practice in Pendleton from 1987-1993, and although he’s since moved to Hillsboro, he continues to commute to Pendleton once a week to see patients.

As the only psychiatrist in Pendleton, Conant-Norville said the schedule change is forcing him to condense his schedule to meet the last flight out of Pendleton at 4 p.m. while trying to accommodate his patients.

“I wasn’t a happy person about it,” he said.

Over the years, Conant-Norville has flown on all the air services that have run passenger flights at the Pendleton airport, whether it was Horizon Air, SeaPort Airlines, or Boutique. Despite the schedule change, Conant-Norville said he is satisfied with Boutique’s level of service and the quality of its aircraft.

Boutique now has a flight departing from Pendleton at 7:15 p.m. on Thursdays, so Conant-Norville said he’s working around the problem by moving his appointments to that day. But he wishes Boutique would have given him more advanced warning so he could have changed his practice’s schedule sooner.

Boutique, which is based out of San Francisco, didn’t return multiple requests for comment, but schedules posted on its website provide some information on the new schedule.

While Boutique originally offered three flights into Pendleton and three flights back to Portland seven days a week, the new schedule offers only two flights both ways on Saturday while bolstering Sunday to four flights in and out.

On the ticket booking page, it shows a fourth flight on Thursday and Friday in the evenings that doesn’t show on the schedule, but instead of a ticket price it states “non-available.”

Pendleton Airport Manager Steve Chrisman said he was surprised too when Boutique modified its schedule and inquired with the company about why it made the change.

According to Chrisman, Boutique responded by saying it used a “heat map” to determine what times were selling the least tickets.

To boost enplanements, Chrisman said Boutique moved some flights away from Saturday and redistributed them elsewhere in the schedule.

Chrisman said he admired Boutique’s initiative to boost enplanements — the U.S. Department of Transportation uses that figure when evaluating whether Pendleton should continue to receive the Essential Air Service subsidy — but he doesn’t want to alienate loyal passengers either.

“It didn’t sit well with some people,” he said. “We caught some complaints.”

While Boutique tries to boost enplanements, Chrisman said it was already an area of strength for the airline.

In 2017, its first full year serving Pendleton, Boutique had 5,689 enplanements, an 87 percent increase from the year before.

Boutique is already ahead of the curve compared to last year.

From January through May, Boutique has 2,427 enplanements. During the same time period in 2017, the airline had 2,099 boardings.

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Contact Antonio Sierra at asierra@eastoregonian.com or 541-966-0836.