Originally Posted by Quintious

Strengths become weaknesses really fast when you fail to adapt or evolve. Yeah great, I can get from Seattle to Pittsburgh now. That's actually pretty cool. But can I get from Pittsburgh to Chicago? Not without going to Seattle first. WN didn't have 4 hubs that were all situated along the same stretch of road the way AS does. As DL showed, all you have to do is throw money at a weakness and you can turn it into a strength. What used to be pretty exclusively AS territory in Seattle is now...well, not. I'm certainly not saying AS needed to build a global network (though losing 20-some-odd partners in the last 8 or 9 years makes that something of a conversation in some regards), but they should have at least established presences in different time zones rather than putting them all along one frigging corridor. This is going to become more obvious a mistake to them as tech companies - long a bastion of hanging out on the Pacific Coast - accelerate their de-centralization plans and start putting more and more facilities in interior locations.

They should have had at least 2 hubs that weren't on that stretch of road - it didn't even really matter where, so long as it didn't mean flying to the corner of the country to catch a connection (St. Louis, Detroit, Minneapolis...hell, Denver even). Saddest part about B6 losing out on VX was that the world missed out on an opportunity to get another full-range carrier. All we got was redundancy which, as you can see, is now being stripped out.