Originally Posted by
kochleffel
In the olden days, Allegheny/US served both ELM and ITH from PIT with mainline jets, in a triangle route (PIT-ELM-ITH).
To my mind, JFK is a harder drive than EWR even if it isn't much farther, and YYZ even more so because of the complicated route from Elmira to Buffalo. The other consideration is that, for an international flight, you're probably arriving in the metro area during the afternoon rush hour. I have Nexus so the border crossing isn't much of an issue, and the Peace Bridge usually isn't congested in the middle of the day; I should think more about flying from YYZ.
In the even older days, Slowhawk/UselessAir had a flight from PIT to ITH with five segments. One of the stops was Williamsport, PA, in addition to Elmira. I think the others might have been Lockhaven, PA, and maybe Altoona, PA but I don't remember except that it required about the same amount of time to drive, roughly eight hours whether you took secondary roads or tried to stay on the PA Turnpike and other highways. It was a small plane with propellers.
BTW, did DL stop serving ITH? PreCOVID-19, they had two or three CRJ-200 flights per day to DTW.
The US/AA flights from ITH were good for convenient connections in PHL to BA TATL to LHR and connections beyond.