HomerJay

For many years, AA flew DCA-IAD-DFW as a way to get around the DCA perimeter rule. You couldn't get off at IAD, IIRC.

Cruss74

There is an Enterprise location at Hwy 99 & 108th and an Avis/Budget lot on Hwy 99 just south of Airport Road. Both are presumably close enough to operate shuttles to/from the airport, but an in-terminal location would obviously be much more convenient.

Cruss74

AA does fly OAK-PHX. In fact, they serve all 3 Bay Area airports and all 5 L.A.-Area airports from PHX.

I think that UA's lack of service to OAK & MDW is more due to the fact that they have very large hub operations at the primary airports in both of those cities. Looking at the busiest routes from SEA, SFO & DEN are #2 and #4 on the list, respectively, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a UAX flight to one or both of them.

Edit to add: Personally, as a Snohomish County native now living in the Spokane area, I'm hoping for PAE-GEG!

eponymous_coward

The PAE terminal is very, very limited in space (deliberately so to not encourage expansion), and it's a lead-pipe cinch AS is going to serve their own hub (SFO), so at best UA would have DEN to itself (and it would be easy for AS to come in and play mutually assured destruction and add DEN if they wanted). I don't see UA deciding to invest in a tiny airport with a limited number of flights and gate space (they coughed up DAL which I would argue is a MUCH better airport than PAE in terms of catchment area; DAL is in the middle of Dallas, PAE is on the outskirts of freakin' Everett).

I think PAE will be ignored by the majors except for AS, given that AS will claim about 50% of the capacity there, quite possibly an LCC like G4/NK, maybe WN decides to take a whirl to someplace like DEN or OAK (though they operate much more like a major these days), maybe maybe DL (and even that I think is kinda iffy; SLC doesn't strike me as the best market). This is a worse airport than LGB in terms of your ability to sustain much service, having a dominant carrier there that can squash you by adding capacity, and how NIMBY the surrounding community is about any possibility of expansion (and I might note even AS turned tail out of LGB).

Note that none of the majors or WN serve BLI, which arguably a similar catchment area to PAE, since BLI is actually about the same distance or sometimes even closer to a lot of Vancouver metro's catchment than YVR, plus you save some taxes.

tbau

This is great news. Long overdue. As for routes, my sources (me) tell me:
> pdx daily x2-3
> sfo daily x2-3
> ord daily
> lax daily x2
> las daily

Madone59

No love for San Diego huh? I guess I am connecting in SFO.

Cruss74

The thing that UA has at DEN (and DL at SLC) that AS doesn't, is connections to the rest of the country. These flights would be more about connecting traffic rather than O&D. Tri-Cities, which is quite a bit smaller than Snohomish County, has UA & DL service to DEN & SLC.

Look, it may never happen, but it is fun to speculate!

toadman

I ride my bike past RNT all the time, and see all the fancy color schemes on the 737's being built for the 55 or so Boeing customers that have placed recent orders for the MAX versions. No need to taxi around in a plane to view them. just do a drive by.

eponymous_coward

But what PSC doesn't have is a viable alternate airport within 50 miles called SEA that offers tons of mainline UA/DL. Nor is AS sucking all the O/D demand out of PSC by offering multiple destinations and frequencies to places like LAX/SFO- AS offers just 5 frequencies at PSC (4xSEA 1xPDX), which isn't even CLOSE to half of PSC's nineteen daily flights from AS/DL/G4/UA.

I expect PAE to come out much more like BLI (dominated by AS, seasonal flights that effectively add capacity to SEA, avoided by the majors, some LCCs checking it out) than PSC or GEG (shared by a lot of airlines, AS doesn't "own" it). I suppose we shall see.

Mehdron

Per this Seattle Times article, it looks like the legal issues are just about moot.

eponymous_coward

Also from the article:

Yeah, I think this will make PAE fairly unattractive for carriers; a hard cap on not only O/D but on operating hours (a 6 pm curfew? Wow). Add in AS hogging almost half the max O/D space...

Explorer789

It does have a lot of residential area around it, so that has to be a concession they needed to make to get approval without upsetting the locals.

I do think there is probably room for maybe one more regional carrier, or who knows, AS might have the exclusive option to expand capacity in the future.

eponymous_coward

The idea is that the county can't exclude commercial carriers from PAE because FAA grants were used in the construction, but they CAN build a small terminal and go "nope, not building any more". It's not a hard cap of slots per se like you have at DCA or LGA, or restrictions on flight distance, but you make PAE fairly unattractive for airlines to come in as an alternative to SEA... and you also make the local airline (AS) dominant at PAE. Kind of a win/win for AS and the folks wanting to keep PAE from expanding a lot. Very similar to what happened at DAL and DFW with the Dallas city council, Congress, AA and WN, where WN got locked in as the dominant DAL carrier by a cap on gates at DAL.

Note that this is almost exactly what has happened: Snohomish County owns the terminal, and is leasing it to a private operator.

Brianblanco

If it's a long term success this is a real game changer for Snohomish County. Talk about growth potential.

I'm in NE Seattle and PA is only 3 miles further than SEA, but the big unknown is traffic south in the afternooon which is usually when I'm going home from the mostly same day turnarounds I do. The traffic north on 5 from SEA to SR 520 / Montlake is surpringly not terrible even during rush hour. Going south from Everett at that time of day might be a different story.

Cruss74

Yikes! I assumed that AS would want to park a couple of planes there overnight. But, a 6 pm curfew would leave them vastly underutilized. AS routinely parks two 737s here at GEG, but they don't arrive until after 10 pm.