Are Uber/Lyft reliable for early morning airport pickup? (rural Kansas)

The issues with Uber/Lyft along with nearly all other companies (at least in the UK) is that the drivers are not employed and choose when/where they work. It is very important under tax/employment regulations that the company don't get seen as an employer, hence they can't act as an employer.

The company you have made a booking with can't force any driver to work at the time you have booked a ride. They also can't force a driver to leave a high demand area (like the airport) where the driver may get a high tipping customer wishing to go to a 5* hotel to drive an area where tips are less likely.

Hence unless you book with a driver directly your booking is mostly meaningless. (Hotels often have a local driver they know that can be depended on.)

Sounds like your issue has been resolved by changing your departure time, but I'll leave my experience here for future readers.

While it is technically possible to schedule an Uber/Lyft ride in advance, I've never felt comfortable with it for early flights, even in a major metropolitan area (Minneapolis). For one thing, the pickup window is pretty wide - usually around 20 minutes - and I don't want to inject that much variability into my morning. And honestly I just don't trust that someone is actually going to show up. I think that the wide pickup window plays into that perception.

That said, I've never actually scheduled a ride in advance, since I can always find a driver. But if I ever needed to schedule a time-critical pickup in advance, I would pay extra for an established taxi service instead of using rideshare.

In case this happens in the future, I would offer one alternative path that might work if you happen to use Uber/Lyft at other times: simply ask the driver if they would be interested in working at that specific time to take the ride. Unless Manhattan has increased vastly in population since I last lived there, anyone doing that sort of service is going to be known or at least familiar to at least a quarter of the population, which means that they're less likely to say "yes" and then flake on you because they know word will get around to people who's opinions they care about.

You're not even violating the spirit (I can't speak to the letter) of the ride service agreement, since you're not asking for work outside that agreement, only if they'd be willing to ensure that they're available at the relevant point in time.

As a side note for others: this is a small airport. The notion of having "a line" to get through security is almost laughable; pretty much everything flying out of it has a seat count in the low double-digits, at most. Before 9/11 pilots regularly flew with the cabin door open so that they could chat with the passengers. While you could land something like a 737 there in a pinch, you wouldn't want to, and I'm not at all sure the runway is long enough to allow take-off afterwards. Ride service from the hotel (singular then, probably still) is "they wake up their driver and have him take you there in the one shuttle bus they have."

It's funny that anytime I've picked couples up for airport rides and there original plans didn't come through. It was because they ordered a Taxi that never showed and there thanking me. A Taxi is FAR from more trustworthy.