pbarnette

That is a correct interpretation.

Every third flight wouldn't match the roughly 40% NW of traffic that went through MSP or DTW.

I would note that, unlike some on this forum, when 3Cforme says something, you can assume it to be true.

dilbertsdaddy

ATL is the best running large hub/airport in the world. If all heck breaks loose that is where I would most like to be stuck. At least during irops in ATL you have a chance of getting another flight.

And it does not happen that often.

apodo77

In a press release yesterday the Delta COO said 60% of all Delta's 1250 aircraft cycle through ATL every day.

Was MSP and/or DTW ever that high of a volume of aircraft?

pbarnette

If they both served ~40% of traffic, I'd have to think so (as a percentage).

fly18725

I would think that 75-80% of mainline NW aircraft touched MSP or DTW each day, mostly because there weren't that many mainline flights that didn't. I think you're 40% tradfic figure is bogus, but I'd agree the amount of traffic outside those two hubs was higher than aircraft due to the oversized RPM contribution of TPAC flights.

Regardless, both NW and DL's domestic systems are/were exposed to 1-2 hubs. They both ran generally solid operations which mitigated much of this risk.

SJC ORD LDR

I would think MSP and DTW were both higher. It doesn't mean that 60% of flights are through a specific airport, it just means that a plane goes there at least once.

TheBOSman

I'd take a number of airports over ATL in terms of best run large hubs. ICN, SIN for sure, likely MUC too. I'd personally take DFW but that might just be me being much more personally familiar with it, there's room for argument there, so I won't add that to a generic list.

dmarge18

I'll at least give you that...it's nice to know there's more options for rebooking (just don't take the last flight of the day and watch those <45 min connections in case of IRROPS).

The more I fly through ATL, the more efficient I realize it is. Though I do miss having more options to fly through just to mix it up every once in a while.

pbarnette

It isn't my figure. But I did some back of the envelope number crunching for the last 12 months of NW's existence. If you take mainline traffic at DTW, MSP, MEM, MKE, and IND and without accounting for any hub-hub traffic (which likely overstates the "hub" traffic at MKE and IND), DTW clocks in at 40% of enplaned NW passengers and MSP comes in at 44%. I'm happy to have someone offer different calculations, but ~40% seems about right.

Pharaoh

Americans specialize in difficult tasks: Thunderstorm Ranking Scale.

Robbyb03

You should've told him that in the mid 2000s ATL was doing as many aircraft operations as all of the London airports (Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Stansted, and Southend) put together...
Now, all those London airports move 1.1-1.2M operations together versus 900-925K for just ATL.

Ber2dca

It's an interesting idea but that article is 6 years old and it hasn't caught on, has it? I think as a forecast element it's not that useful because it's like predicting tornadoes by EF scale i.e. extremely uncertain and problematic. It could be a useful classification for statistical purposes though (which insurance companies as well as aviation interests may find useful for example).

Robbyb03

You're literally trying to compare airports to ATL that move 35-40% of the aircraft and roughly half of the passengers. Atlanta is in a class by itself when it comes to best run, most efficient airports in the entire world.

13thandseven

Hubs that are primarily international and ones that are primarily domestic have very different operational parameters, so I don't think it's fair to compare ATL vs. ICN/SIN/DXB/DOH/CDG/etc.

DFW was built for O&D passengers, and it serves that purpose well. It's actually quite inefficient as a connecting hub, though. Passengers connecting between east/west terminals (A/D and B/C especially) have no choice but the train. I've personally experienced 30+ min. taxi times in perfect weather just to get to a runway on the other side of the airport. It is not efficient.

Arguably the second most efficient airport in the US is DEN, in terms of both ground operations and passenger convenience. I'm sure it's purely coincidental that DEN was built from scratch to mimic the layout of ATL. I can't blame them - if it's not broke don't fix it.

GSP flyer

While I don't expect it to happen, there are some traffic flows it would be benefcicial to shift to DTW, MSP, and SLC, particularly NE-West Coast flows. Additionally, they could cut for example, 2 ATL-JAX frequencies and move one each to DTW and MSP.

While Delta's never going to be able to isolate aircraft transiting ATL to the same extent as AA did at ORD, they could try isolating some portion. Perhaps, for example, limiting the MD-90 and 321 fleets to ATL or something like that.