Originally Posted by SAN-man
Trvlr - what do you mean by "SAN-SJC is in fact AA's highest O&D route out of SAN"? Do you mean people flying just from 1 city to the other and not connecting on? If so, I still find that hard to believe. They average, what, 350 seats a day to SJC, vs. about 1500 to DFW? Surely at least 20% of the folks onboard SANDFW get off in DFW. Personally, I only use SANSJC when I'm going on to Tokyo, but obviously there are only a couple flights that you do that with....
Believe it or not, I swear I've seen the numbers on this before. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics has redesigned their website, so I can't pull up the statistics just yet, but I did some quick searching, and saw that each month AA flies a TOTAL of around 7500 pax to SJC, 16000 to ORD, and 31000 to DFW. Given that almost all of the pax going up to SJC are probably Origin & Destination (that is, they don't connect to go anywhere except NRT), I'd still say there's a pretty good chance that SJC is the top O&D destination out of SAN.
I'll keep looking for the right numbers.
Originally Posted by formeraa
What does the SAN airport authority have to say about this? Perhaps AA had no choice. Why in the world does SAN have a separate commuter terminal anyway? It is the most stupid thing since commuter airlines (including Hughes Airwest) in Seattle flew out of Boeing Field for years and years after SEA-TAC was opened.
I believe in the past that the airport had some sort of "perimeter rule" (like the ones at DCA and LGA) that required flights under a certain distance to use the Commuter Terminal. I guess the reason was to discourage commuter aircraft from clogging up the main terminals, and hence persuade the airlines to concentrate more on nonstop flights out of SAN in lieu of relying on one-stop extensions and feeders from LAX.
Nevertheless, I think that American simply wants to consolidate Eagle ops in one location.
Aaron G.