----- Original Message ----- From: "Bahadir Acuner" <bahadiracuner@xxxxxxxxx> To: <AIRLINE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, December 15, 2003 16:14 Subject: Re: [AIRLINE] NYTimes.com Article: US Airways; Stock Hurt By Southwest > >Hubs, in my opinion, suck. While it may be good for the airline, in many > >cases it makes no sense for the passenger. Come on - look at a map. The > >LA area is nearly due south of SEA. Yet, if you want to fly Delta, you > >need to go hundreds of miles out of the way and connect in SLC! Except > >for airline nuts like myself, that makes no sense whatsoever. > >David R > > That's your personal opinion David. Thanks for stating the obvious, Baha. Maybe I didn't use the word "personal" but that's what I said. >On the other hand hubs work. Why? They > do make sense from economics perspective. They also work from pax > perspective. > > Thanks to hubs, small to mid size cities get more destinations. Yes, it does work for small/mid size cities (even though the airlines are constantly tring to drop services to the small cities - see, for example, http://dms.dot.gov/search/document.cfm?documentid=261377&docketid=14536 - I get notification of these terminations nearly daily). > For instance, a ROA-DSM market may not be economical no matter what kind > of aircraft you use. On the other hand, if you route the pax through > a hub <IAD, DTW, CLE, ORD, CLT, PIT> then you can pick enough pax from > ROA to any of these hubs, and then route them to the other places. > On the small city to hub flight you can put enough pax to justify > the cost of operating from ROA to hub, and then distribute them to the > various destinations. It use to be that the airlines operated many direct flights between various cities with the passenger having to change flights. For example, CO use to operate many flights a day between LAX and IAH with 1 or 2 stops in Arizona and Texas to serve smaller cites. The result was that you could fly between smaller cities without having to connect in an out-of-the way hub. > Let us not forget that airlines that are profitable have successful > hub-spoke operations. AirTran in ATL, BWI; JetBlue in JFK; Alaska > in SEA/PDX; etc. I'm still up in the air about if JetBlue has a true hub. Yes, nearly all flights go through JFK. However, with New York being such a large metropolitan area, I wonder how many pax on JetBlue that use JFK are O&D as compared to connecting to other flights. > Yes , it may suck to transfer through a hub and wait few hours > (like my flight today RIC-CVG-YUL), but I am sure if a non-stop > RIC-YUL would be profitable, would already be served by now.. The airilnes are addicted to hubs. I think there are many city pairs that would support point-to-point service with regional jets but the airlines have become to entrenched in their hubs to do it. ALso, the unions are afraid of regional jets and won't allow airlines to expand their usage. > BAHA > Fan of ComAir CRJs having leather seats compared to ACA's Congrats on not using UA David R http://home.attbi.com/~damiross http://home.attbi.com/~damiross/books.html