Originally Posted by
indufan
It is almost exactly a one-hour flight from IND-ATL. It's a little farther to MSP and a little shorter to DTW. I can make up the 20 minutes or so difference on a shorter connection MOST of the time. More than 25 years ago, friends gave me .... for flying IND-ATL-SEA and they just couldn't believe it was the fastest way to get there in total time.
This is a big part of the reason why flows are pushed over ATL vs DTW/MSP. Delta has 9 hubs, but only two of them are primarily setup for domestic connections, ATL and SLC. The majority of Delta passengers at the other 7 hubs are actually majority O/D, and not connections. Even MSP is over 50% O/D last I checked.
I know some will find this hard to believe, but you will be hard pressed to find any domestic Delta flight from DTW over 500 miles in length, where (on average) the majority of passengers didn’t go through TSA in DTW. Remember, majority is just 50% plus a feather, so yes there are still plenty of connective passengers. But network related, the reason a flight operates from DTW and not ATL is seemingly because more than half the plane originated in DTW. If that 50% can’t regularly be achieved on 500+ mile flights, the flight and connection flow seems to get moved to ATL.
I think it’s really as simple as it’s most economical to have as many connections as possible through one hub, as opposed to a split hub operation. Obviously the west coast is a bit too far geographically, so SLC is still needed. But if Delta can route a connection through ATL, that seems to be the preferred operation.