I understand completely about needing to cover their fixed costs, but if United dies, they won't be able to cover their fixed costs and they'll need to come up with an alternate source of funds. Presumably the other majors would pick up most of the O/D traffic by increasing frequencies between Denver and their hubs. That leaves the airport with, what, the sort of level of service maybe SAN gets today? Busy, but nowhere near the amount of business they get now. At that point they have a half-empty airport and they have to decide how badly they want to be a hub. Given the state of the airline industry, I don't see anyone building up a hub without a lot of incentives. And you'd think discounted landing fees would be one of the incentives a potential hubber would insist upon. Cheers, Jon ----- Original Message ----- From: <B787300@xxxxxxx> To: <AIRLINE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 6:42 PM Subject: Re: Airport official: replacement for United may be necessary > And my point is that DEN has very high fixed costs to make required hefty > bond payments that they sure as hell don't want to default on. They also > have substantial maintenance and labor costs to operate the airport and all > these costs come from fees assessed to the airlines, tenants, rental car > companies, limos, taxi, buses, etc. > > They can't lower the fees much for other new carriers because there won't be > enough revenue coming in to pay the bills. One scenario could be the > governing board persuading the city and/or county to tax property owners to > subsidize the airport through property taxes, which would probably cause a > firestorm of revolt against anyone voting in favor of such a measure.