Originally Posted by hi55us

Good thought, only issue is the flight times to/from PPT. LAX-PPT is an 8 hour flight, just over 4k miles so you can run the route daily with a single aircraft (with 4 hour turns at either end for servicing the widebody). With 4,000 miles, you have a wide variety of widebody aircraft that would be capable of the distance. Running it from ATL-PPT means you can't use an aircraft like the 767 and you probably would have to assign 2 aircraft on the route instead of 1. So from Delta's perspective they'd rather keep running the 767's they have today ATL-LAX and offer a connection to a 1x a day LAX-PPT. It's just much better aircraft utilization.