Originally Posted by
fastflyer
Not NYC, but other northeastern and Mason-Dixon cities:
BDL, PWM, MHT, BOS, ALB, ROC, SYR, BWI, RDU, PIT, MDT, BUF, YYZ, YUL, CLE.
Travelling from these airports to other airports in the midwest and south, like:
BHM, CMH, IND, MSY, BNA, MEM, JAN, JAX, RIC, CVG, CHS, CRW, SAV.
It is an overshot to fly to Miami or Chicago or Dallas for many of these connections. The new AA needs Charlotte as a central, East coast connection point.
PHL could serve a similar role, and especially for New England O/D, but it's really too far east (and likely too congested) for someone travelling from Cincinnati to Birmingham, for example.
Good point, but a lot of bad examples. The flight paths from BOS/MHT/BDL/PWM to CLT all overfly PHL, and it's not any less convenient than CLT for any flights from ALB/SYR/YYZ/BWI.
There are certainly some city pairs where PHL or ORD is inconvenient, but very few where
both PHL and ORD are terribly inconvenient. To use your example, CVG-PHL-BHM is ridiculous, but CVG-ORD-BHM is only about 150 miles further than routing via CLT. That's about a 15-20 minute difference, in reality.
The real loss if you give up CLT is the intra-south flying -- you'd pretty much be ceding those trips to DL. No one is going to fly from MSY to GSO via MIA or PHL.