Originally Posted by SEA_Tigger
The whole point of a hub-and-spoke system is to funnel people from the spokes into the hub and get them on to their eventual destination (and the reverse). So why offer two 50-person planes an hour apart when one 100-person plane can fill the role?
UA really needs to review their route system for frequency. I imagine that most routes can handle one 737/Airbii in the "morning", one in the "afternoon", and one in the "evening". Then, in-between the three mainline flights, they can run one CRJ-50 for a total of five flights, versus the 8-10 RJs they have now running every 90 minutes or so.
Well, no system is perfect. Here are a few issues with this proposal:
1. Aircraft availability: Even with a massive restructuring of routes, UA doesn't have enough aircraft to provide mainline service to every station that could conceivably support it. For every mainline flight to Eugene, Nashville or Santa Barbara, UA has to take service from somewhere.
2. Reduced effective banks: If you reduce the number of flights from an airport, you reduce the number of usable banks of flights from that airport. Implementing this model would mean that passengers would be concentrated into three huge banks during the day. Ground support would be swamped during these times but relatively idle otherwise.
3. Increased station costs: Once you start flying a single mainline flight into a station, that station must be staffed by UA personnel, not UX personnel. UA is willing to support some stations with only a single mainline flight (e.g., Wichita) but I doubt they'd be willing to support every station.
While I think that there are things the FAA and individual airports can do to reduce congestion (e.g., landing fees that vary by time of day, landing fees not based on weight, re-implementing slot controls at ORD) I'm not sure a wholesale reduction of RJ flights is the way to go.