Good catch, cheaper to fly bigger birds *per seat mile*. With Delta Connection/ASA paying their pilots $20k, those CRJ200s provide cheaper seat miles in comparison to an A319. That's the problem. The trick with Southwest/Frontier and jetBlue is that they distinguish the difference between market and city. Spokane and Boise maybe smaller cities, but they may be extracting a big market share. Since they are not feeding a true hub system (and therefore trying to 'time' those hub waves), they can service the smaller cities with an appropriate and profitable schedule. If a particular market is not filling 4 737s a day, the non-hub carriers can quickly switch it to 3. United can't do that because of a hub network, the ripple effect greatly complicates things. If United was only filling 300 out of 400 seats in a market, and shifted it to 300 seats; because of the dynamics of their hubs, they might only fill 250 out of those 300 seats. That's how United and Air Canada managed to go from nearly five or six flights from Chicago to Vancouver a day to three A319s. Vancouver and Chicago still have the same population, and folks haven't radically changed their business destinations in the last two years. It's the dynamics of hubs. My opinions... Matthew On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 10:04 AM, damiross2@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > It costs more more mile to fly a larger aircraft. I think you meant > it's > cheaper per seat mile. > > Southwest, Frontier, and JetBlue all fly into smaller markets. > Southwest, for > examples, flies into Spokane and Boise. JetBlue flies to Burlington, > VT > (although it could be argued that BTV may attract traffic from > Montreal). > > David R >> No question, that as a pure $/mile cost, it's cheaper to fly bigger >> planes than little planes. >> >> Add in many of labour contracts, and that cost advantage tips to a >> negative. >> >> Southwest, Frontier, jetBlue don't have the ridiculous labour >> contracts, and also don't fly to smaller markets and hence can fly >> 737s/A320s comfortably. >> >> Of course, Southwest is a point to point carrier, which leaves >> different metrics altogether. >> >> Matthew >> >> >> On Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 02:21 PM, John Kurtzke wrote: >> >>> Matthew, >>> So Denver works fine as a hub, if both legs are on aircraft of >>> major airlines; it works poorly as a bus station where you would >>> connect >>> to or from a regional carrier. I'm not sure that's a problem. >