hfly

There were two main reasons that PDX failed as a hub.

1. McDonnell Douglas lied about the range of their MD11's. If there was and headwind for years they had to divert and refuel, very often in ANC. We are talking weeks and months on end.

2.The INS at PDX. They are absolutely horrible to Asian people, lots of scandals of people being detained, questioned and deported. You can go back and find the bad press in the US, but worse these articles were huge in Asia, to the point where many TA's would not book their partners on Delta through PDX.

koreanair720

Re: point 2, some old timers still refer to PDX as "deportland"

MSPeconomist

3. IME the PMNW TPAC flight to PDX from NRT tended to arrive too early, before CBP was open for the day. As a result, passengers were held on the aircraft for close to an hour upon arrival and of course missed the opportunity to move to earlier connecting flights. It was very frustrating and even though PDX connections tended to have cheaper fares, I quickly put PDX onto my personal do not fly list.

teddybear99

My first flight to Manila was in 2000 after my adopted son was born. We flew PNWA MIA-DTW-KIX-MNL twice in 2000. In 2001, while going through the adoption process, the flights changed to Nagoya. We were actually supposed to fly 9/13/2001 for our final hearing on 9/17/2001. Unfortunately, we were delayed for obvious reasons. Our Filipino lawyer had to beg for postponement because we weren't able to fly. We were able to get it rescheduled for the second week of October. My family did not want us to fly, but I assured them that this was probably the safest time because of all the extra security.

All other flights we took were through Nagoya which surprised me because they had more flights going to Tokyo out of DTW than Nagoya. I stopped flying Delta after the merger when we started getting less expensive flights through Korean Airlines.

All our flights were booked through a Ticket Consolidator and were just 60% of the fare if you booked directly with NW/DL. I found out close to 50% of the plane's fares were booked through consolidators, so the margin wasn't that high. The airlines flew those routes because of the high profit cargo they had in the belly offset the low fares. A lot of cargo was lost when the US started to let more imports come from China so the demand for cargo decreased. Thus they didn't need so many flights to Japan anymore.

MSPeconomist

Thinking back, I'm even glad I took my domestic PMNW flight a couple days after 9/11, returning home from a business meeting and then a house party for the stranded. I think it was the first flight into MSP and IIRC it was late Friday afternoon, after spending the day at a WC as flight after flight was cancelled.

It was probably about a month until my next trip, which was a business meeting at DCA, so those flights had special security procedures and the weapons protecting DC, but nevertheless I was glad....., partly because it got me past the "am I ever going to be able to fly again?" introspection.

ADDED: Sorry, the post above mine made me think I was in the "flights you're glad you took" thread.