US Airways Dividend Miles (Pre-FlightFund Merger) - New DCA-ATL/CLE/DFW/DTW/IAH/ORD Service

One poster on airliners.net (http://www.airliners.net/discussions/general_aviation/read.main/1782650/) has disconvered that US Airways has loaded new service from DCA into its schedules:

4x CRJ DCA-CLE
3x E70 DCA-DFW
4x E70 DCA-DTW
3x E70 DCA-IAH
4x E70 DCA-ORD

This new service is likely being inaugurated with slots leased from NW. NW acquired these slots in EA's assets sale, but began leasing them out after their mini-DCA operation tanked. US had previously leased these slots, but lost the bidding to DL in 2001, but now DL will switch its excess DCA operations to IAD.

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EDIT: I had read the previous thread earlier today, but it appears the OP has since edited to include the above information. Please feel free to lock this one & link it to that one (this one will still be a great attention grabber, since not everybody will realize this service from that thread's title).

All to competitors' hubs. Very interesting...

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/10-18-2004/0002284322&EDATE=

More about upcoming restructuring plans and flight rearrangements.

Granted I'm biased, but I like the changes in DC a lot - if you look at the airliners.net thread you get a sense of what is going away, but I think from a business perspective, this allows US to go after major markets that it hasn't ever served from DCA. Some of them present strange choices - flying US on an RJ to Chicago vs. flying a code-share UA plane to Chicago, for example - but to markets like ATL, DFW, IAH, I think this is could be a significant help to US.

Same thing goes for the move from Express carriers to mainline in many of the smaller markets served out of National. If the capacity is there (I feel like whenever I've seen planes head out to places like ALB, BUF, BNA, SDF, they are carrying good loads), I think US will see this move as beneficial.