Okay, so this is the busiest 3 months of my year for air travel (to and from school, seeing the girlfriend, etc). The airports I typically hit are BWI, BOS, MHT, PVD, GSO, CLT, RDU, and usually FLL or MIA with the family. Due to it being near school, I can ONLY use BWI.

Upon calculation of my predicted flights in these 3 months, I realize that I will NOT be able to qualify for Airtran Elite through their ten-oneway-in-90-days plan, which would have been my best shot. I think 25 separate one ways (connections don't count) in a year would also be too much. It's because when I have time for travel I will, but can't just spend a day doing mileage runs because I have class.

So I spent some time looking into AA, DL, US, UA, etc for miles based programs that I could use to stretch trips out with connections. Then I stumbled upon US Air...I found they go everywhere I need to and have good prices.

Apparently one needs to get 25k miles or 30 segments in a year to get their silver. I know I can't get 15k miles flying up and down the east coast in 400 mile segments, but perhaps I could instead make a bunch of connected trips over the next year to reach 30 segments, e.g., BWI-ATL-LGA-BOS instead of BWI-BOS. That way I could hopefully reach silver. I should note I am only interested in upgrades and free bags, not so much using miles for reward tickets.

Questions:

-Should I make the switch?
-Will US credit individual segments of a flight, unlike FL that only counts the trip one way as a whole?
-I know upgrading with a silver on AA and DL is a nightmare. Is US the same way? I only plan on flying not-so-popular flights between the aforementioned cities.
-Does US have a 90 day challenge like AA?

This is the last of my threads like this, I promise!