PIT will lose all mainline service
 

Sadly, all mainline service to Pittsburgh will be discontinued in December. Last day of mainline service is tentatively set as 1 December 2005. On the "bright" side, MIA-PIT is tentatively set to get a second daily the first week of January, but that barely makes up for it, I know. As recently as July, MIA-PIT was supposed to be a daily 738/daily ERD operation starting in November.

Unfortunately, Colombus and Memphis will also be losing all mainline service sometime in late '05/early '06. Kind of odd that this will leave Dayton as the only Ohio station with mainline.

As WN continues to expand and thrive at PIT, this was bound to happen. Same thing LAX-SJC - All Eagle, All the Time.

bah, what nonsense-- as if PIT-DAL is a meaningful WN route.

it's more likely a significant, though painful, cost cut to take stations with a single mainline spoke and multiple Eagle spokes and simply make them all Eagle. fewer ground employees on mainline wages... only prudent as fuel costs stay high and competitors go under the knife in Ch 11. it will likely cost AA a little business from me (CMH-DFW is not an Eagle flight I will take in preference to a nonstop from here), but I never pay high fares to go there anyway.

I'm a novice so please excuse my ignorance.... so what do you mean by mainline service?

I live in Pittsburgh and have about 200k miles in my AA account and since my wife and I have opened AA-citi-cards and will be adding at least 80k miles a year between us I'm really concerned how this will affect us.

They are speaking of American Eagle/Connection services only. No MD-80's just the CRJ's

Mainline service = American Airlines rather than American Eagle service. Mainline service is in MD80s, 737s, 757s, 767s, etc. Mainline service has first class cabins. American Eagle has only coach. Etc.

Mainline = Shiny large jets that say American on them, as opposed to white, small RJs that say American Eagle. :)

Mainline equals expensive pilots, FAs and ground crews, while Eagle means reduced wages for everyone, small planes and No First Class.

It has little, if anything, to do with Southwest. ORD and MIA were already all-Eagle, and those are where WN indirectly competed (with MDW and FLL). WN is not allowed to carry PIT-DAL passengers on one ticket, so they didn't compete there.

It has to do with getting rid of high-paying mainline stations, and replacing them with lower-paying Eagle stations. Unfortunate, but one of the cuts that keeps AA as the most financially stable legacy airline.

For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for PIT :(

Huh?

Assuming decent loads on the maddogs to DFW, the unit cost to haul a butt on that route gets higher on the eagle metal.

If AA would bring back PIT-JFK, they would fill it with international traffic.

AA has had eagle on the ORD runs for years--they've chased the frequency (5x or so/day) rather than capacity. I don't know of too many people who are going to tolerate the CRJ all the way to DFW (presumably to connect west/south) rather than AA or UA via ORD or LUV or HP/US via PHX or LAS or US on the E170 if heading to DFW.

Oh well.

Very true. However, it doesn't really have to do with that. PIT is a mainline station that employes 76 people (for only nine daily flights!) at mainline pay rates. This right there is the killer. By making PIT an Eagle station, they can fire those workers, and then rehire them at Eagle wages, which is much lower. As a result, though, they can't put mainline back at PIT, because than the fired/re-hired employees have quite a legit lawsuit on their hands. Same with the soon to end mainline service to Columbus and Memphis...too many mainline employees for too few mainline flights. Some smaller mainline stations, like Dayton and Greensboro, are out-stationed or already worked by Eagle employees, so it isn't an issue there, and mainline can continue.

The PIT-DFW flights have been completely full on MD-80s every time I have flown on them. Even as PLT, I never had an upgrade clear.

I can't argue with the economics. I just hope that AA uses the opportunity to increase frequency. I have noticed that when connecting LGW-DFW-PIT particularly on the winter schedule it is impossible to connect from an afternoon departure.

I would support a few daily PIT-JFK frequencies, timed to connect with a bank of transatlantic flights (as DL does). It makes little sense to backtrack to ORD when flying transatlantic, particularly as this increases the flight length. It would also increase opportunities to connect to JFK-LHR/ZRH/BRU etc. flights as well as other OW partners (AY to HEL, CX to YVR/HKG, MA once they enter OW).

They have put mainline back in at GSO after a period of all Eagle (which was after a period of mainline before that). Are you sure about not being able to put mainline back at PIT?

MD80s still show on AA.com for late December and early January.

It just hit me that the first leg of our trip next June, PIT-DFW, goes on an MD-80..... how will that work since we already have seat assignments?

The MD-80 holds 135 where and ER4 only holds 50 ..... hope we don't get screwed on this one.