Originally Posted by
Section 107
The rules at DCA require only 11 of the 67 slots to be used specifically for flights of 76 or fewer seat (or 56 and less depending on type of plane) flights. For all of the other slots, except for the GA slots, while they are used predominantly by small planes, there is no requirement for this and could, in fact, be used for ANY size plane. You can bet that the airlines would love to use bigger planes to shuttle more and more pax into these slots.
Um...what "67 slots"? Can you please provide a reference for this as I have never heard of it before and would like to learn more.
Probably a moot point anyway as even if airlines could convert commuter into mainline slots, they don't have the gates to support it. Mainline gates are already at or near capacity. There was a thread over on the AA forum a few months back about long delays waiting for gates to open after landing. Any type of ops delay (weather, mechanical) seems to create a cascading delay as there is simply no place to go if the previously assigned gate is still occupied. I've experienced it several times myself and it's not fun.
Originally Posted by
Section 107
If Congress would allow DCA to subsidize IAD then it wouldn't matter so much.
Actually, MWAA already uses revenue from DCA to subsidize IAD:
http://www.businesswire.com/news/hom...-Realigns-Cost
The agreement will also modify the revenue sharing arrangements from surplus cashflow between the authority and the signatory airlines as well as introduce a new formula to subsidize IAD's debt costs that are passed on to carriers using a portion of the surplus revenues derived at DCA.