Originally Posted by
flyer703
Where did you hear this?
From the WSJ article linked to in OP. This is echoed in
the Horton/Parker letter to employees: "the reductions in DCA and LGA are expected to have little or no impact on mainline flying and will impact regional jet flying mostly done by contract partners and those regional jets will be deployed elsewhere in the new American’s network. These divestures will require the new American to discontinue nonstop service from DCA to some destinations currently served."
DCA slots are either "commuter" or "air carrier." 74 of the 298 slot pairs (290 in use + 8 leased to B6) owned by US/AA are "commuter" slots, for use by
50-seat RJs or 70-seat props.
The settlement states that all of the divested slots will come from the "air carrier" pool (104 slots = 2[8 AA-B6 slots + 44]).
BusinessWeek notes that
the DOT agreement just means the "commuter" slots will be RJ flights to non-top-29 airports; hence, the
commuter slots can't be used for RJs to ORD, JFK, PHL, DTW, MSP, etc. These airports must be served by "air carrier" (but don't get your hopes up: US/AA will fly RJs in many of their mainline slots).
The future slot pair composition will be:
246 total
172 "air carrier": mainline/RJ to any airport, including 6 beyond-perimeter
74 "commuter": RJs to small (min 56 slot pairs) or medium (max 18) airports
(Wikipedia has
a list of US airports sortable by "role," e.g., large, medium, small, and non-hub. BNA & RDU are among the medium airports.)
tl;dr: There will be at least 56 flights/day to small airports, but that's a lot less than there are currently.
Originally Posted by
ERJ170
I think RDU is going to get screwed the most cause there will only be one carrier (nobody really sounds like they will offer RDU-DCA) and fares are already ridiculous on the flights (>$460).
Both WN and DL (!) offer BWI-RDU non-stop for about $200 RT advance purchase. Not much fun to spend 1.5h getting to BWI, just to spend <1h in the air, but hey, it's cheap.
At the very least, I'd imagine that the AA frequencies to BNA & RDU would be cut, with remaining flights timed to meet US connections at DCA (and/or that RDU-LHR).