Originally Posted by
FWAAA
You may be right, but what you've described is basically what PHX has right now. PHX does have plenty of room for expansion. PIT has a lot of room to expand also, but PHL is where the O&D is. Same thing with PHX and LAX.
The difference with PHX is it has the O&D and room to expand. LAX doesn't.
PIT didn't have a ton of O&D, and with negotiations with the city going down the tubes, I don't blame US for bailing there. PIT has a ton of room, with only a fraction of the airport in use at the moment. If it were built up into a hub, it'd be something along the lines of CLT. I don't see US going back there.
Quite a few of the smaller cities in the west already have AA service from ORD or DFW (and some, both). For short-haul intra-west connecting traffic, PHX fills the bill. For long-haul connecting traffic between the west and east, ORD and DFW are already there. To be sure, PHX enjoys a lot of O&D. So do LAS and MCO, and neither of those is a traditional hub anymore. No need to fly a small plane from Fresno or Tucson to PHX if you're headed somewhere in the Midwest or East, as AA flies mainline planes between DFW and FAT/TUS. It's those types of connections for which PHX is not necessary with the new AA.
That may be true but the NW is a huge hole in AA's network currently. The only flights AA has from PDX and SEA are to DFW and ORD. AA relies heavily on AS to fill that gap as you're screwed on AA metal currently. PHX at least makes it more feasible to move around the west more easily on US/AA metal.
I think AA should dump a lot of the short haul AE routes to PHX and replace them with more international - build it into an international hub.