Clearly, but how does a single JFK-BOS flight serve O&D business traffic? Obviously the BOS-NYC business market is served by the LGA shuttle.

For some business in the outer boroughs or Long Island JFK would be preferable. Probably not enough but maybe enough for an AM and PM flight.

Oh, I agree that there's some business that is better served by a JFK flight. It's the single daily flight that I don't understand, unless it's largely a utilization or repositioning flight.

Not saying there is no market, but I don't think any JFK-BOS service, past or present, has been planned with specific regard to Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island O&D demand.

With the reduction of domestic flights at JFK T8, I feel every time at T8 I am with LATAM and CX pax, and of course with a handful taking connections at LHR.

AA is cheaper because their former passengers that wouldn't have even checked DL or B6 prices in the past have moved on...LGA-PBI was a true AA loyalist's route, historically, for a very long time.

I would guess that timing is more about parking a plane overnight at BOS instead of JFK (and having the frame available for an early morning departure from BOS), not international connections.

JFK-BOS goes back to 5x daily in July. Looks like it's just a temporary reduction.

Either a temporary reduction, or the July schedule is still the default placeholder schedule that hasn't been "schedule changed" yet.

Selfishly this is the main reason I bemoan the reductions on this route as a BOS resident. I prefer to connect in JFK over MIA when going to SA, for the shorter domestic hop and longer overnight flight. The reductions basically force me to MIA (or DFW) for all SA itineraries.

It certainly serves a niche O&D customer base and exists without regard to AA's planning for connecting traffic flows. Was absent for a while and was a big deal for many when it came back.

This is interesting. When I did a MR to get back to EXP, I did this route on the 3-class 328 and perhaps half the pax were Brazilians who connected from GRU and GIG.

Looks like this change is going to be in place at least through November. Only one daily flight. There are numerous reductions among the AE flights with majority of destinations (CLE, CMH, BWI, YUL, etc.) going down to just one flight per day. Granted this may be mainly driven by the runway closure, but I won't be surprised that most of those cuts will stick.

LAS also permanently goes down to two daily flights. SAN/SEA goes down to 1x daily.

Side note - flying between PIT/JFK to connect to TATL flight is very frustrating. AA charges more to fly PIT-JFK to connect to a TATL flight even though the flight loads are very poor on this route. For our upcoming trip to LHR, we are connecting in DCA on the outbound to JFK :rolleyes:

I suppose this is what happens when you lose economics of scale necessitating to charge a premium to make the "hub" profitable.

Side note 2 - AA is now definitely feeling the squeeze at PHL operationally after rebanking PHL (eliminated two banks and made the remaining ones bigger) and trying to make PHL the main TATL hub where there are severe infrastructure limitations. On our PIT-PHL flights its becoming more common that we have to sit on the tarmac at PIT because there is no gate or space to park at PHL if we arrive early.

If you force a routing (PIT-JFK-LHR), which is not available as a thru fare, you're going to have to pay for each segment separately. Why would you do that rather than accepting one of the plethora of thru fare routings offered : PIT-PHL/ORD/CLT-LHR ??

The statement : " AA is definitely feeling the squeeze at PHL operationally after rebanking" is a personal and refutable opinion.
If there were "severe infrastructure limitations" at PHL, AA would have abandoned it, not bulked it up into its now "main TATL Hub".

Delaying the departure of a flight that would arrive earlier than scheduled and tie up a gate that was scheduled for an on-time arrival is very typical at most Hubs, such as JFK, LAX, ORD, etc.. It's called schedule/gate management.

Yup..from my experience of taking CX865 frequently, by 9pm it's mostly "Qatar Airways paging XXX" and the terminal seems to have nothing to do with AA.

Stop Crying :D. During the next downturn, the typical churn will occur. PHL will be turned into a regional Hub. JFK will return as AA's premier International Hub, with flights to every city on earth. Liz Taylor and RIchard Burton will even rise up, sip a glass of Chateau Patris and nibble on a plate of Couscous in the Terminal 8 Flagship Lounge.

this is predicated on the assumption that management knows what it is doing. Considering that DL is making it rain, while AA's filings are ghastly (they're clinging to profitability due to the credit card business), I dont think this is a very good assumption.

MIA is also a mess in the late afternoon/early evenings. Landing early in particular means a trip into the area of unwanted planes. I live in MIA and as the minutes tick and tick away I can see the stress level rising as connections are getting tighter and tighter as the Captain keeps telling us that he's still waiting for the gate to become unoccupied. Since AA can blame missed connections (often the only/last one to SA, CA, the Caribbean) on airport flow, AA can tell paxs to make and pay for their own hotel and meal arrangements. (Possibly CKs/EXPs making a trip to the AC might find different). I don't think Parker and company really care. They'd rather have the financial upside of banked hubs with little concern about the pax.

The moral of the story is sadly that anything less than a 90 minute connection at MIA can be problematic.

More OT, I was looking at the board in the JFK AC the other day. Europe seems to be down to MAD, BCN, CDG, MXP and LHR. I wonder if BCN is at risk of going to PHL. I think the other ones will stick. SA seemed to be GRU, SCL, and EZE. I assume those will stick, particularly GRU and EZE. IIRC the only Caribbean destination seemed to be BDA.

Isn't SCL operated by LATAM, not AA?

They also have FCO for Europe and a bunch of seasonal Caribbean flights (some may be weekly rather than daily). I could see MXP eventually moving to PHL solely due to the amount of airlines on that route (DL, EK, Air Italy, AZ from JFK + UA from EWR), but I'm not sure if they would move any other Europe flights to PHL for a 2nd daily or just discontinue them from JFK and maintain PHL at its existing level for that city.

I think there's strong demand from NYC to MXP although with that number of airlines who knows what kind of yields AA is getting. I don't know what kind of demand would be outside of NYC. From what I understand Milan is a very industrial city. BCN is a bit strange as it would seem there isn't a huge local demand from NYC, unlike MAD. SCL is in fact LATAM.

Took the weekly seasonal JFK-SKB flight this Saturday. I know Saturday morning is the lightest travel time of the week, but boy was it sad in T8. Just feels totally lifeless in the midfield terminal.

Flight was lightly loaded, no one for the exit rows, and MCE was not full either.

It was interesting to me that even at 8AM the Departure Boards had so little on them to show the Europe night flights were already up.

It seems the only flight AA gives a hoot about is the JFK/LAX route. Other than that good luck getting around directly. I switched over to Delta this year because my situation changed and now I'm flying JFK/SEA of which they only have one daily direct flight option, pitiful.

The Admirals Club last Friday morning was similarly depressing - we were two of maybe 15 total guests. That said, my upgrade rate to/from JFK is fantastic these days (even on premium transcons), and I can't complain about never having a security line with more than two people in front of me.

I just did a pass on my reservations and my SEA-JFK-DCA is now SEA-CLT-DCA. There's no longer a non-stop SEA-JFK (at least in May).

Fortunately (?), PHL already has a BCN flight. But co-sign all of the posts above on how sad JFK T8 can be at certain (or all?) times of day/days of week.

AA has said some of the recent reductions, especially the Eagle ones, are related to the closure of 13L/31R this summer (other airlines have been asked to similarly reduce their schedules), and that they'll resume flying their "full schedule" in the fall once the runway is reopened.

This is purely anecdotal, but the times I have flown between JFK/BCN, many people on the flight seemed to be O&D, either visiting family or tourism (on both ends). The flight is also timed well for business, where you can get a full day of work in Barcelona. And the load factors were pretty decent. Granted, I don't know the kind of yields they're getting because I bought JFK-BCN rt for $500 and I've also seen JFK-MXP for $450 on occasion (in May, no less).

The thing is that AA still runs a solid schedule out of LGA, and they are not giving up slots at either airline - so despite their weakening positioning, they really aren't cutting net capacity, or so it seems. On Saturdays especially, all of these airlines (and especially American) are flying flights that are half full. I've been on plenty of Delta flights in and out of NYC that are lightly loaded. Are airlines OK with this situation long term?

Those routes may be profitable overall (although I tend to think AA makes very little, if anything, on its domestic operation). If they cut out flights for Saturday afternoon and evening they have to find a place to park those a/c. Then there is the issue of getting a/c back online to cover the heavy Sunday afternoon flow. For work I often book last minute travel and can't get a Sunday afternoon flight out without going way over policy (a just booked a Sunday MIA/ORD flight and if I had left in the afternoon it would have cost over $1,300). So there's more to it than airlines willing to fly half empty flights. Often it's a better option.

Posted at the CrankyFlier blog today: https://crankyflier.com/2019/04/09/a...ork-this-fall/

Looks like they will be increasing the # of flights/day out of JFK post the runway renovation.

Schedules this fall, and beyond, are subject to change. AA has been reducing JFK, and may not have implemented the reductions in the fall schedule yet.

For what it is worth this blogger used to work at American and it sounds like he talked to people at American when writing this post so seems like, at least for now, American's intention it to actually expand the JFK schedule in the fall.

It is a shame that AA and AS can't codeshare between JFK and SEA considering the minimal service the AA now offers. Our JFK-SEA flight on 6/1 was cancelled. The AS flight would have been a good alternative.

Would have been nicer to see more long haul, intl. routes use those slots post Nov 2019.....

PIT-JFK-LHR is definitely a through fare... You can see in the fare construction of a random search I just did that the fare doesn’t break for PIT-LON with a JFK connection.

PIT AA X/NYC AA LON 370.00QKW8C1B5 AA X/NYC AA PIT 320.00

For hub rebanking - sometimes how things look on a spreadsheet does not always translate in reality. Rebanking absolutely helps drive down costs by a considerable margin.... When everything goes according to plan. When you pad your flight times too much (i.e. PIT-PHL has 30-40 minutes of padding) it gives a false sense when calculating ground resources causing revolving operational challenges on the ground when something skips a beat (ground crew, gate agent, caterering, gate space, etc.). Once one link shakes the domino effect begins.

Rebanking is better than rolling hubs no doubt, but the question is how aggressive should you be with rebanking? I think this is the challenge AA has right now as I can tell from my experience that AA is deep in the aggressive terriority (missed connections, mis-catering, gate agents struggling, lack of gate space, etc.). AA’s operational reliability is not very good and their financial results aren’t showing the benefits that I think they are hoping to achieve from tightening up the hub banks.