Originally Posted by
SchmutzigMSP
Easy for you to
say...
NW basically has
no infrastructure in DTW besides the actual airport ops for DTW. They can't support an airline NW's size. A combined NW/DL? Forget it. As for ATL becoming the new HQ? I hardly think DL is ready to just accept an airline the size of NW into its ATL operation. Their IT/IS infrastructure alone is years behind NW's. What about the multitudes of other areas of an airline? A combined NW/DL would be too large for DL's ATL HQ.
There's no good argument out there for MSP being disbanded, and I'm not just saying that because it's my home airport. I do question some of the DTW members, though, as to why they think it'd be just so easy to de-hub MSP. Yes, your airport is newer and has superior facilities. We get that. But it's a lot more than the terminal facilities that makes up an airline.
Frankly I wouldn't mind if NWA abandoned DTW - there are a few airlines that would take up the slack and we'd have some other options. However, I don't see that happening with the investment they have made there - the 330 base and most Intl ops are run out of DTW, and I do not see NWA giving that up. JFK may lose some service, but NYC has plenty of local traffic, that will mean that JFK will remain at least a mini Intl hub.
I am not thinking MSP will just go away, but its Intl services will be dropped and that feeder traffic will go with it, making it a smaller version of its previous self, at least in the short term.
A combined DL/NW cannot support more than 3 major hubs, the question to me is what kind of secondary hubs it will keep.