DL MIA Expansion: New MCO, TPA, SLC, RDU
 

Nice adds will be curious how they perform.


At least 1x RDU - MIA and MIA - RDU frequency seem designed for continuing on to South America via LATAM while the other RDU - MIA and v.v. frequency looks more aimed at O&D. I'll be interested to see how these do, especially the RDU - MIA.

RDU in particular is an interesting one because the difference between RDU - MIA - South America vs. RDU - ATL - South America is marginal but the ATL option still provides DL metal the whole way which I bet is going to be the preferred option for most medallions (including me).

This isn't too surprising. They have a JV with LA and need to feed their flights.

Wondering how AA will retaliate

Also, where are the planes coming from? This Saturday’s schedule update could be interesting

MCO-MIA again, what is this the third time it’s been tried over the past 10 years? Hopefully it will work out much better with 2x daily on RJs rather than 1x mainline and the LATAM feed in MIA will help as well. Sadly I won’t probably use this flight very much now that I live south of Orlando in St. Cloud, it’s just as fast to drive to MIA from my house. I also wonder how this will go over once Virgin Trains starts operating in 2022 from Miami to Orlando?

Have you been around long enough to remember the MCO DL mini-hub? I remember connecting in MCO once and hitting the 777 MCO-ATL.

Was it TPA or MCO where DL used to do quite a bit of the more significant scheduled maintenance on wide body planes? I recall a lot of large aircraft between ATL and both TPA and MCO between say 2000 and 2010.

AA will have a hard time maintaining their MIA schedule with the loss of LATAM, so they can not counter there. I guess they could discount at ATL, but that would be token given their size there. As by far the worst off financially of the big 3 they can not do much.

I do. I started doing my DL flying right about the time this ended which I believe was 2007-08. I remember flying on a 777 from MCO-ATL as recently as 2014.

Pretty robust schedule to MCO with 5 x daily 175s. Certainly more than they've ever had in the past to my knowledge

Wouldn't be surprised to see that equipment size increase as AA begins to fail more and more in Miami.

OP Link is 404

Correct link:

https://news.delta.com/delta-bolster...tnership-latam

I wonder what the plan is going to be for MCO growth and DL. When Terminal C opens up at the beginning of next year, I assume that BA, LH, EK and possibly AC and DY will move from Airside 4 to Terminal C. If that happens, there would potentially be more room for more LATAM and DL feeder flights.

I don't know about the maintenance but MCO had a lot of widebodies. Two reasons were cited here, the capacity was needed and pilots in training needed volume on takeoffs and landing on newer widebody aircraft. It had a lot of 764s when they were new. But they flew about every widebody they had down there then. I think some of it was squeezing just a little more usage out of them between international flights. If it was going to sit on the ground in ATL for four hours, it might as well run down to Orlando and back.

Keep in mind at the time 764s were replacing L-1011s and 777s were replacing MD-11s. L-1011s were used very frequently to MCO and MD-11s also saw at least a turn or two each day.