MiamiAirport Formerly NY George

Kind of sad, I had lots of fun in F on the old A300s, when AA flew A300s interisland. First B6 forced the duhub and now the JFK route. I was there a couple times over summer and missed the AC. Nice little AC with great staff.

ESpen36

AA's SJU operation is really sad this days. Terminal D is like a ghost town....you can walk through the dusty airside corridors remembering fondly the days when those hallways were thriving and packed with pax! So sad....

nova08

Approximate weekly SJU schedule for the month of September
PHL - 11 weekly flights **half are 330's
CLT - 6 weekly flights
ORD - 6 weekly flights

For a very low travel month especially to the Caribbean in the middle of Hurricane season, 23 weekly flights to these 3 hubs isn't bad.

ESpen36

I remember in the old days (ca. 1980s?), Pan Am flew CCS-SJU-JFK. Everyone deplaned at SJU to clear US FIS and then reboarded the old DC-10 to fly up to JFK.

Of course, SJU also featured two of the most unusual non-hub AA metal flights in the world until the early 2000s: BDL-SJU and CCS-SJU.

jordyn

It's arguably worse than that: the elimination of SJU and reduction of service to SFO are partially offset by increased frequency to...DFW.

It's very hard for me to understand how this represents a better use of slots at JFK. Maybe AA is really trying to go after the Long Island business traveler who enjoy airport TexMex so much they'll add several hours of travel time to their journey to get some?

PUCCI GALORE

I was there this December and I thought the same. it was a lovely Admirals Club with wonderful views of the runway.

arlflyer

I think AA's market research has apparently shown that their customers just really, really, enjoy connections. The more connections, the better.

ccengct

For that matter, there was once RDU-SJU nonstop. Both hubs long gone.

I am no fan of connecting at MIA, but I confess that Concourse D works reasonably well and that connecting intra-AA at MIA is not the pain in the neck that it used to be.

GunsOfNavarone

"I think AA's market research has apparently shown that their customers just really, really, enjoy connections. The more connections, the better."

Not sure about that, but I had to fly from Harrisburg PA to LaCrosse, WI recently. Had to fly MDT CLT ORD LSE. Going MDT ORD LSE was hundreds more, even though expertflier showed Y7 on MDT ORD for the flight.

I sense AA has some master plan of keeping certain hubs more relevant than others(JMHO).

ESpen36

So sad...

MIA is fine for D-D as well as D-I.

But, I-D and I-I can be annoying if the lines upstairs are backed up. GlobalEntry is almost obligatory in this day and age if doing an international arrival into MIA.

ysolde

This saddens me greatly. I grew up on AA as the main airline out of SJU, starting in my teen years. I got my Aadvantage number when I was 17, and became a member of the Admiral's Club at SJU (secondarily, as a family member on my parents' membership) at 15 or 16. I loved the Admiral's Club at SJU, loved seeing my friends, and my parents' friends, dressed up in furs (politically incorrect now, not so much in the 80's) when they were going on their post-Christmas ski trips. I wonder to this day how much skiing they got done, and how much was just showing off their lovely outfits at the shops and restaurants.

I remember fondly meeting up with friends as we were heading off to college for the first time, looking out that big window as the planes took off with a mixture of excitement and apprehension, hugging one another as our parents told us it was time to board.

I remember the flight I took with my parents when I was looking at colleges: the excitement I felt made that flight magical. It was also the flight that took me to the Secondary School Students' Program at the University I would end up attending.

I remember the flight my parents and I took to take me to college: my excitement; their sadness and apprehension combined with pride. It was a great flight, in coach, when coach still served meals and had good service.

I remember my first flight back home, for Thanksgiving: sharing a cab to the airport with a couple of friends, checking my suitcase (which, looking back, was huge), and going through security with nothing but my boarding pass and a smile. It was a morning flight, and I sipped at my tea and had my eggs and sausage and watched the movie on the overhead and listened to a Howard Jones station on the audio entertainment and my parents were waiting at the gate when I got off the plane, thanks to their AC membership.

So many memories. I was still flying this route, and was planning to fly it this year. But I guess it will be DL from now on. Sigh.

tracon

A few interesting graphs from Routesonline.

Also interesting are the difference in block times.
1972.
2017.

PBIGuy

MIA is the mainland business center for Puerto Rico, so if AA is trying to maintain business routes and offload leisure routes, this makes sense.

jordyn

Of course, this assumes that people in NYC that are sometimes/mostly business travelers don't sometimes want to go on vacation. More to the point, AA's not doing anything here to maintain business routes, unless there's a big opportunity in Long Island<->DFW business travel that AA's just discovered.

ysolde

That's true for some businesses, not for others. Puerto Rico's main bank still has its mainland HQ in NYC. PR's government (such as it is ) does its business in NY and DC, not in Miami. I can think of one major PR law firm that maintains (or at least maintained) a presence in DC (mostly for lobbying). Now, in terms of shipping, I agree, MIA and, to a lesser extent, NOLA, are PR's biggest business centers.

The bottom line, I think, is that PR's economy has greatly contracted over the last decade and that it is not likely to return to its former (relative) robustness anytime in the near future (I would argue that it will not return in my lifetime, but I am a pessimist in this matter). AA has focused its business on the business traveler -- PR does not have that market anymore, and will not likely have it anytime in the near future.