Originally Posted by
eponymous_coward
Yeah, it would be a tough go of things. ALL of those have WN presence, HOU's a "hub" where WN is even stronger than at STL, MCI, BNA and AUS are midsize cities where you're fighting with WN for a pretty small pie.
I would guess AUS would be "closest" to being a match for the VX/B6 target customer (millennial, urban, techie), and VX and B6 both serve it pretty well, even though the VX DAL-AUS service flopped miserably. They'd serve SFO, LGB, FLL, BOS, MCO, JFK. That's...something? If you added LAS, DAL, IAH/HOU, ORD and flipped the LGB service over to LAX that would probably be a reasonable midcon focus city to build on.
(I suspect that the merged B6/VX entity would fold up LGB for LAX. There's just no reason to run two hubs 20 miles from each other, especially one that is as facility limited as LGB is compared to LAX.)
I don't think it will happen (definitely not in the next 15-20 years), but some here and in San Antonio like to float around a joint airport located between the two cities. Ignore for a moment that Austin and San Antonio are about 80 miles apart downtown to downtown (by comparison, Dallas and Fort Worth are 30), and thus getting to/from the cities to the airport could be a hassle unless some sort of high speed rail option was built to both cities (think KUL, which is a similar distance from Kuala Lumpur). That's about the only airport that could support a hub plus WN anytime soon in the middle of the country, with a slight caveat towards STL or BNA if both had significant growth.
That said, VX is only 1-2x daily to SFO from here (and doesn't serve LAX at all), and B6 serves many destinations but isn't more than 2x daily on any of them (I don't think, but definitely not more than 3x daily). So, even here, neither is particularly large.