A survey of rural Eastern Oregon communities, places like John Day and Burns, done for the state Aviation Board turned up predictable results. People and businesses in the Oregon outback want to be able to fly from home to places like Redmond and Portland, and, what’s more, they don’t want to pay much to do so.

We’d all like that, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Rural residents do have a tougher time getting out into the bigger world than those of us in communities served by airlines. John Day, for example, is almost a 3 1/2-hour drive from Redmond, adding nearly a full day of travel to any planned trip by air. Residents of other communities in Eastern Oregon face similar obstacles to airline flight.

The state’s Department of Aviation clearly recognizes the problem, and a couple of years ago its officials began discussing some sort of public air shuttle that would connect outlying communities with commercial-travel airports.

Yet what residents and businesses want and what they say they’re willing to pay for are two different things. Take the cost of tickets: Most survey respondents said they’d like to pay between $0 and $100 to purchase an air-shuttle ticket. So would we. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to take a commercial airline out of Redmond for much under $150 one way (plus fees and taxes), even to destinations where competition should have an impact on air fares.

Moreover, most apparently are reluctant to do what Central Oregonians have done a couple of times to lure better service to the region. That is to pre-purchase enough tickets over a period of time to assure that a carrier won’t go broke on the deal. The tactic was used most recently to persuade Delta Airlines to establish a Redmond-Salt Lake City connection.

Those elements combined with the state’s understandable and proper reluctance to subsidize an air shuttle probably doom the idea for now. The state cannot justify spending millions of dollars simply to reduce travel times in Eastern Oregon, nor should it. With K-12 education’s insatiable demand for budget dollars, with community colleges and higher education in even worse financial shape, with human services and corrections all needed more money, a state air shuttle simply is not in the works.