Originally Posted by
Microwave
While I agree that CLT is not in trouble in the near or medium term, I find that there are some factual inaccuracies in santarosaflyer's statement above. AA have no problem getting passengers into MIA (last year MIA saw 50% more traffic than CLT, and it is not slot controlled); JFK is somewhat more limited due to peak hour slot restrictions, I'll grant that. I also beg to see any source that shows AA's operating margins across the Atlantic are worse than US's (talking about post-restructuring, not comparing oranges and hammers by looking at pre-bankruptcy costs and yields which are no longer relevant).
With all of that said, and getting back to my original point, I personally believe CLT to be the best positioned of the US hubs going forward, so would also be bullish about its prospects.
Not sure where you're getting that MIA had 50% more traffic than CLT. From each airport's respective website, I'm coming up with MIA having 39.47 million pax in 2012 (~20 million domestic and ~19 million int'l), and CLT having 41.23 million (~38 million domestic and ~3 million int'l).
On top of that, CLT is roughly 90% US Airways, whereas I'm willing to bet while high, MIA isn't quite that concentrated for American, just based on the number of foreign carriers that fly there.
So I guess what I'm saying is, there's a lot of domestic traffic that's currently going through CLT right now that would need to be shifted if CLT was de-emphasized, and I'm just not sure where it would go. I'm sure a bit of it can shift to MIA, but I think there are lots of routes where that wouldn't make sense...who wants to fly HVL-MIA-RIC instead of HVL-CLT-RIC? Or CHS-MIA-BNA instead of CHS-CLT-BNA? I think there are a lot of examples like that where CLT just works well.
Sources for the passenger info:
Miami info:
http://www.miami-airport.com/2012_traffic_report.asp
Charlotte info:
http://charmeck.org/city/charlotte/A...sIncrease.aspx