PIT has been referred to as a hub since this whole merger thing started. Every bit of printed material that I receive from the company that mentions PIT refers to it as a "hub". See, LAS is called a hub and it is much smaller than PIT. Hell, CMH was called a hub and it had 50 flights a day at its peak. Can you imagine the crying from East if we called PIT a focus city and tiny LAS a hub. LAS is a pimple compared to PIT.
And DCA is bigger than either PIT or LAS, yet nobody calls it hub, secondary or otherwise, yet nowadays it indeed carries plenty of connecting traffic. Explain how that all makes sense. :blink:
In terms of seats offered it goes: CLT, PHL, PHX, DCA, LAS, LGA, PIT, BOS
In terms of total departures offered: CLT, PHL, PHX, LGA, DCA, PIT, LAS, BOS
In terms of mainline departures: CLT, PHX, PHL, LAS, DCA, BOS, LGA, PIT
In terms of nonstop destinations: CLT, PHL, PHX, LAS, PIT, DCA, LGA, BOS
Pax carried is generally the big thing used to determine the "size" of a station, but as we don't have access to that, seats offered seems to be the closest metric to use to determine which stations are bigger than others.
Imagine if everyone realized that CMH was once called a hub as small as it was
Things were different back then. US used to call IND/DAY/CLE/CMH/MCI/etc all hubs, and they usually had about 100 departures, never more than 200 or so. It's just that the term focus city wasn't used back then. Even the great BWI never had more than 250 or so flights--gives some perspective for those who think that WN can run US out of the way bigger PHL hub.
