Seems to me everytime SWA comes into a market, US puts its head between its legs and cowers out like an injured dog. They grow and expand. We shrink and retreat, and or throw it to the regionals.
Remember our base at BWI?
Remember our base at PIT?
Delta had announced it was going to hire pilots and flight attendants.
Will this have any effect on their hiring decisions?
Will this kill our CLT market?
LUV LUV LUV LUV LUV LUV LUV LUV
This is a worn out debate that always recurs.
US Airways had hubs from Miami to Boston and all in between. Ft. Lauderdale, Charlotte, Washington DC, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Dayton, and Boston and then they had point to point flights from Albany, Rochester, Syracuse and some Floridian cities.
Baltimore was already being reduced before Southwest had really became anything in Baltimore. United and US Airways had planned a merger in the early 2000's while WN began expanding BWI.
Back then, US Airways was trying to get away from hubs and make focus cities all over the east coast like WN. It didn't work for US. So, they try to hit the restart button. BWI, DAY, & FLL got the boot. Then came B6 and more WN competition, then LGA and BOS take a hit. US was still in financial trouble so they booted PIT.
Now everyone excluding DCA, CLT, and PHL on the east will get the boot absent the shuttle and I guess now LGA.
PIT had high landing fees. US Airways was in trouble. They had a 300/400 Flight operation in PHL and a 400 flight operation in PIT. PIT competed with other connecting hubs out there including US's hubs. It made no sense to have PHL/PIT.
Consolidation. PIT was consolidated into PHL and KCLT.
WN came into the picture at BWI (A place US didn't even want to be in anymore because they wanted to consolidate their operations and probably wanted to get out of BWI because if they ever wanted a merger, BWI/DCA might have anti-trust issues, etc.) and they seen US wanted to leave BWI and thus they came.
WN came into the picture when US had completely lost interest in PIT. And US Airways is still the largest carrier out of it's spoke, PIT...
WN is not going to kill US in CLT by flying 4 routes at a not so low-fare price. Even absent WN, it's not like WN would be stealing any walk-up fare customers from US... I was watching on Fox Charlotte how most people drive to Atlanta because ATL has the lowest fares in the south, or most CLT people connected in ATL on Airtran, or they drove to RDU for WN. WN is going to stop a lot of Airtran connection traffic. Airtran's ATL operations is 70% connecting traffic.
When WN comes to CLT, WN will be focused on mostly O&D. It doesn't harm CLT based people who doesn't travel on the dime of Bank of America and other companies because we all flew Airtran and connected in Baltimore and Atlanta in the first place. Just means that some of us wont be driving to ATL and RDU.
Delta has a 1,000 peak daily flights in ATL and US will have 610+ in '11. If US were to pack up and leave Charlotte, I wouldn't be surprised to see Charlotte renamed "Charlotte Hartsfield International Airport" and have Delta absorbing a couple hundred flights or so. the most population region in the US (the Southeast) and the plentiful population in the North/North east would have just Delta/ATL as a connection point. US is fine at CLT.
US Airways is perfectly fine at Charlotte. OUTSIDE Charlotte is where US will be hurting. Everywhere where US doesn't have a presence is what is going to be US's Achilles heel. US's growth will become stagnant one day in PHL/CLT/DCA and well... Only way to expand is by merger (like Airtran).
