Originally Posted by
Often1
Terrible schedule Eastbound. DCA is a great business traveler destination and can command significantly higher fares than IAD or BWI. But, really hard to justify a day out of pocket.
AA pretty well fills the morning departures from LAX to IAD, so there are plenty of folks that would disagree. At the same time, the evening departure from DCA makes all the sense in the world. My bet is that they determined that they could make more money running this schedule rather than a redeye/morning return.
My strong preferece is for the UA pink eyes departing LAX and SFO to IAD around 4:00 PM, arriving around midnight. Gives you 2/3 of the day on the West Coast and still home by 1:30 AM. Obviously that arrival time won't work on a "noisy" aircraft such as a 757 at DCA, but it would be nice.
The afternoon flights out of LAX for IAD are my preference, too, even the AA mid-afternoon departure that gets in sometime between 10:30 and midnight. That said, I do sometimes take the morning flight from LAX to get me in for a dinner engagement.
Curfew is an issue, but there's also an issue of parking the AC overnight at DCA.
The bigger thing, I think, is the QF connections at LAX. QF's schedules should coordinate with this schedule.
Originally Posted by
ashill
Noise.
Less about noise than to drive traffic to IAD.
There almost certainly will be. There are 4 slot pairs that are reserved for AS/WN/VX/B6 etc. I'd say it's virtually certain that VX will apply for an SFO-DCA slot, and it seems likely that B6 will apply for DCA-Los Angeles (maybe LAX, maybe one of the other LA airports to get a monopoly of their own instead of competing with both AS and AA).[/QUOTE]