Rumors Rumors Rumors....

[Pacemaker]

[blockquote]
----------------
On 11/13/2002 7:25:19 PM wings396 wrote:

I still think that the downsizing of the PIT hub has to do with the BIG picture..that being an eventual merger between UA & US..we all know if the merge went thru before PIT would go before ORD..what we are seeing here is the same type of deal that ruined the DAY hub after the PI merger..only this is being done in advance.
----------------
[/blockquote]

Wings396, I think you see the Big Picture very well. US Airways will have and less and less of a need for those pesky west-coast destinations. My only quibble with your post is whether we will see a merger, more likely a fragmentation of U.

 

[chipmunn]

Earlier this week I posted information about US Airways plan to paint the remaining silver B-737s, with information why the airline intends to keep 279 aircraft in operation.

Today Dave Siegel confirmed the 279 aircraft fleet plan during a Q&A session at the Wings Club luncheon in New York.

If US Airways would go from 28 to 10 gates in PIT, where would 279 jets operate?

About two weeks ago I suggested to senior management it may make sense to move regional flying from the E Concourse to the A Concourse in PIT to provide economies of scale, after reading about the idea on this message board.

I was told US Airways Group would keep all of its PIT gates, any maybe acquire more, because the company needs the feed to grow the airline, when revenue returns.

In my opinion, Councourse A will eventually become all MDA, Concourse B will be all mainline, Concourse C gates will remain international, and Concourse E will be turboprop, 37, 44, and 50-seat RJs.

Expect Concourse A to see much more RJ traffic beginning in December with major affiliate carrier expansion in 2003. PIT is an important hub and I expect the company to grow its RJ operations in 2003 and add more mainline flying when revenue permits, maybe in 2004.

Chip

 

[Robc98]

Pit airport will become the RJ hub for Usairways....I said in a different post that Usairways will take every small to medium city in the Northeast and convert to Mainline/Express and run the flts thru Pit to get to each others small city destinations....My opinion is that MDA will never come to be as an airline with staffing of Cust svc and Ramp...MDA if it should ever come alive will be similiar to Mesa....an express carrier with Crew member employees only...our CWA contract with the Mainline/Express agreement allows the company to redesignate every airport it wants to without ever having to classify it as MDA....its a real shame that we will have this happen to us yet on the other hand is positive for the members that they have the option to stay and work in their home cities under the CWA CBA and have most of the bells and whistles that come with the Mainline Contract....except pay of course...which sucks........unlike the ramp who do not have this agreement and there jobs are currently being outsourced to companies who pay 7-8 dollars hr....that sucks even more........just my opinion on this scenario but why would Usairways do it any other way???

 

[Furloughedagain]

Chip-

Stop by the E-gates sometime.

You said, Concourse E will be turboprop, 37, 44, and 50-seat RJs

The E-gates, when they were designed 15 years ago, were designed for the Metroliner, Jetstream 31, and the occasional Shorts 360 and Dash-8.

The Dash's long wingspan took up far too much space, so they were shipped over to the A-concourse. The E-gates squeeze as many Dornier, Saab, and Beech 1900s as they possibly can in there.

Trying to park RJs on that concourse would drastically reduce the number of airplanes that the concourse could accomodate.

What they REALLY need to do is a complete re-build of the E-gates that is designed for today's less-traditional regional airliners. Something along the lines of Comair's Cincinatti operation would be great, or our Philly Express terminal.

At the same time that they rebuild E (and what better time to use it as now, when the capacity is down and there is room to put those airplanes elsewhere) they desperately need to put Jetways on the A-gates that are designed for the regional aircraft there. Right now we're taking high-yield, premium customers (heck ANY customers should be of importance today) and we're going to make them walk down aircraft stairs onto a slushy ramp where they will pick up their snow-covered carry-ons and walk back UP a set of stairs to a jetway and into the terminal. What about our older customers or disabled customers?

That is not the kind of experience that the customers of the airline of choice should be subject to. Take American Eagle's concourse in O'Hare as an example -- in my opinion the finest regional airline facility in the country. The customers dont know they're on a commuter until they bump their head on the ceiling! (tongue-in-cheek)

As these facilities are being renovated the Express ground-staff needs to be completely retrained with an INTENSE focus on customer service and, by that I mean massive training, secret shoppers, etc. Right now there are express agents on the E-gates who treat our customers like garbage. They can barely pronounce a city-name and half dont know what state the city is in. (When they announce boarding to Ottawa, CANADA... dont you think that might be a little offensive to Canadians? Do you think that Air Canada gate-agents board flights to Pittsburgh United States? Ottawa ONTARIO Canada ladies & Gentlemen)

Affiliate carriers need to go to school to learn seamless service. I dont want to see Mesa flight attendants wearing Mesa uniforms (instead of USAir uniforms). I dont want to see pilots who think they dont have to wear their hat since they dont work for USAirways. I certainly dont want our customers to have to board airplanes that are in the wrong paintjob! And I dont want to have to listen to different cabin-announcements on each of the 7 different affiliate carriers! SEAMLESS service. If Dave wants customers to feel safe riding on the regionals, then he needs to make that experience as much like mainline as possible. Personally I think any further affiliate codesharing is a mistake -- you just dont have the quality control that you do with wholly-owned companies.

My point is this. If you truly intend to make RJ's the focus of the US Airways operation, then you had better darned-well make sure that you have the infrastructure to do it RIGHT.

The E-Gates just ain't gonna cut it.

 

[ITRADE]

[P]
[BLOCKQUOTE][BR]----------------[BR]On 11/13/2002 7:46:45 PM TomBascom wrote:[BR][BR][BR]Maybe it's just me but...[BR][BR]what does PIT have to do with East/West traffic flows? (Other than some statements from management that don't seem to have much meat to them...)[BR][BR]It seems to me that any time I want to get to the west 2/3 to 3/4 of the offered connections are through PHL and then there are 1 or 2 through PIT and 1 or 2 through CLT. And the PIT & CLT connections often have cute features like 3 hour layovers. So why not shut down PIT and improve frequency though PHL & CLT?[BR][BR]
[P][/P]----------------[/BLOCKQUOTE]
[P]I think its just you. As USFlyer said, coming out of DCA to the Left coast, a good chunk of the options are through PIT. My routine flights to SAN [STRONG]had[/STRONG] 7x daily flights - 3x via PIT and 2x via CLT and PHL. CLT always seemed to run smaller equipment (A-319s and A-320s). However, the CLT times were always good and were an alternate when the popular PIT flights looked booked.[/P]

 

[DCAflyer]

Pacemaker opined:

My only quibble with your post is whether we will see a merger, more likely a fragmentation of U.

DCAflyer responds:

Please tell the good people of this message board what these signs of fragmentation are. I've looked, and I don't see them.

What I see is forward-looking statements and forward-looking actions coming from CCY. We were certainly a lot closer to fragmentation this time last year. If it weren't for Dave, that process would already have begun. If we were fragmenting, we would not be reorganizing. We would not be renegotiating our contracts. We would not be shopping for RJ's. We would not be forming alliances. RSA would not have invested millions and millions of public employee pension dollars into a fragmenting air carrier. Dave would not have come on board to restructure (or, in our case, structure) the company. Just because you can't see the big picture that is developing, and therefore don't like what you think you are seeing, doesn't mean the US Airways portrait now being painted in Arlington doesn't make sense.

US Airways is NOT fragmenting.

 

[UAL777flyer]

PIT has everything to do with East/West connection flows. Maybe you were flying to a strong O & D market. But PIT should be US Airways major East/West connecting complex. CLT is on the coast and therefore is of little use with East/West flows. CLT is more North/South and omnidirectionally focused. US is limited in how much it can beef up PHL's East/West flows. PIT is not. And UA had no intention of getting rid of PIT. There would have been structural changes, but the hub would have remained.

US is supposedly committed to building its' network west of PIT. If that's the case, they're not going to get a solid connecting flow through already congested PHL. Totally getting rid of the PIT hub is foolish, unless their objective is to much more dramatically shrink the carrier down. That could very well be the case.

 

[TomBascom]

[blockquote]
----------------
On 11/14/2002 11:56:48 AM UAL777flyer wrote:

PIT has everything to do with East/West connection flows. Maybe you were flying to a strong O & D market.
[/blockquote]

Originating from MHT, going to IND, DEN, PHL & BWI recently. SFO used to be pretty regular too. I've also been researching fares to ISP & LGA (can't get from MHT to ISP without tricks...)

[blockquote]
But PIT should be US Airways major East/West connecting complex. CLT is on the coast and therefore is of little use with East/West flows. CLT is more North/South and omnidirectionally focused. US is limited in how much it can beef up PHL's East/West flows. PIT is not. And UA had no intention of getting rid of PIT. There would have been structural changes, but the hub would have remained.

US is supposedly committed to building its' network west of PIT. If that's the case, they're not going to get a solid connecting flow through already congested PHL. Totally getting rid of the PIT hub is foolish, unless their objective is to much more dramatically shrink the carrier down. That could very well be the case.
----------------
[/blockquote]

I don't think I disagreed much with the should part when taken in the context of healthy traffic. My main point, which seems to have been lost, was that with the situation as it is it might make a whole lot of sense to table that idea and focus on PHL & CLT. If PIT were shut down this afternoon and the traffic re-allocated through PHL & CLT the additional traffic wouldn't overwhelm PHL and but the increased number of options would be a big benefit to the business traveler in the strongest O&D hub in the system.

(BTW, CLT is further West and not much closer to the coast than PIT is...)

 

[UAL777flyer]

Ok, imagine for a moment US shutting down their PIT hub tomorrow and distributing the traffic through PHL and CLT. The overwhelming majority of that traffic would have to be distributed through PHL, simply because of CLT's geographic location on the East Coast and is thus a poor East/West connecting point. So you're telling me that PHL could easily accomodate that much additional traffic in terms of gates, ramp space and ATC? I'd be surprised. Granted, PIT only has about 150 mainline departures currently. But putting almost all that traffic in/out of PHL would not work real well in my opinion. It might seem easy from a customer's standpoint. But from a scheduling/planning perspective, it's a very tall order that would require significant lead-time to implement without dramatically affecting what little revenue stream is left. Then there are the 255 daily US Express flights in/out of PIT. If you shut down the PIT hub, where is all that flying going to go?

 

[autofixer]

Actually CLT is just about due south of PIT.

 

[UAL777flyer]

Yeah, but if you look at circuity of connecting flows, which is extremely important when building a schedule, you'll see that east/west connecting flows make more sense via PIT than they do via CLT.