Originally Posted by
Box10
Many airports being only 1 connection from each other is something from the past 30 years. In the 1960's, 2 stops and interlining may have been necessary.
basically, prior to deregulation in 1976, markets and frequencies were subject to government approval ... the airlines had little if any leeway to decide anything in terms of service patterns beyond, perhaps, what equipment they would operate on a particular flight (and, in some cases, even that may have been constrained by the number of seats they were permitted to offer between Point A and Point B)
if you had wanted to travel between, say, Baton Rouge and Sacramento in the pre-deregulation era, you would have HAD to interline ... there was no single airline that served both cities