Originally Posted by millionmiler
AA's ORD-NRT flight is probably their busiest route to Japan. I can imagine that they want to offload some of the traffic to the new flight out of LAX.
That makes sense. The LAX route is 4.3% longer (more costs to AA for same $$) and, including stopover times, takes 1:51 longer than flying through ORD. Heck, even DFW is a better transit point: it's "only" 1.0% longer and saves 1:38 to the passenger over the LAX routing. So AA is obviously facing unexpectedly low counts on LAX-NRT (hence the "sudden" change).
The only plus: a "direct" routing will save ~$7 in taxes: $2.50 in segment tax + $4.50 in airport fees (in the case of ORD, DFW and most other airports)!