Originally Posted by
SOBE ER DOC
I'm surprised it's taken this long to draw MEM down. It's completely redundant with ATL and does not have enough O&D to support a hub. If larger cities like PIT, IND, STL and MCI cannot support a full hub I'm not sure why anyone thinks MEM can.
My guess has always been that DL got some significant savings by piggybacking on the infrastructure that FedEx built and maintained.
The poster who mentioned that UA is not an option for those of us in the SE is spot on, IMO. Being based in HSV now, I never even give UA a second thought for any of my travel except when I go west (which, for me, is rare). At about ~60m, a flight to MEM was short enough to be barely tolerable as a connection, even when going east.