goheelswks

Sad, sad news for those of us who try and fly out of RDU and "cheat" by snagging a connection through PIT rather than a certain SE PA city if we can't go through CLT.

Why can't they cut service to/from PHL instead? Cut down on the traffic during their new (?what's old is new again?) banking scheme...

chanusa

I just moved to Binghamton (no P), so I was really excited to hear that PIT direct service is back! Flying through PHL made the drive more appealing...

UAzip

They haven't updated the schedules to reflect eliminating MHT yet....I'm checking out tickets for my brother in MHT over the holidays and there are still connections through PIT shown all the way into January. November 8 is coming soon; shouldn't they have changed it by now if they're eliminating the flights?

Lehava

Welcome to Binghamton - think that brings the FT total to 2 of us here. You beat me at pointing out there is no P in our name. Personally returning PIT to BGM will allow me to go back to flying them. PHL was absolutely not functional for me, and since DL is giving up a bunch of their flights here when their new schedule starts in December I guess it might be back to US Air for me.

jfunk138

It's bizarre because there definitely aren't flights in November MHT-PIT but December 4 they start showing up again. The downloadable timetable doesn't seem to reflect the change yet either. Could it be that it's only disappearing for 1 month? Eliminating MHT-PIT seems unusual as it was even frequently full when it was serviced by 737 in late 2004.

MAH4546

The geniuses at US Airways scheduling department decided that instead of making the November schedule upload "indefinite", they would just have it show through November, and when the 8 December upload is ready (probably next week), then they would upload that seperately. This is causing routes and equipment changes to show only through 8 December, when they are indeed permanent. For example, FLL-EYW is upgrading to E70s in November, but for December, it is shown as CRJs again. PIT-MHT is gone.

carl92103

They need to bring back the PIT-SAN non-stops. I hope they realize that PIT is good mini hub with minimal operational problems. They are turning that market over to the other LCC airline Southwest. They keep announcing expansions

chanusa

The flights between Pittsburgh and Binghamton, Elmira, Ithaca, and State College are once again being dropped.

US Airways is ending direct service from Pittsburgh International Airport to four smaller cities. They are: State College on April 1; Ithaca, N.Y., on March 31; and Binghamton, N.Y., and Elmira, N.Y., both on April 23 ..

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06083/675701.stm

bigred93

It was just poor scheduling on their part... I tried desperately to fly ITH-PIT to avoid PHL but could never get the routes to line up. I don't believe that the powers that be are competent enough actively set something up to fail, but if they did, they would have set it up exactly as they did.

Lehava

STUPID decision on BGM, those flights are going out quite full and desperately needed!!!!

GotCalcio4

Exactly. The flights had an awful schedule. A 1:25 pm departure from any one of those cities isn't going to enable very many connections. Plus they've cut so many routes to other cities, what's left to connect to?

Wave1

My co-worker is going to be pissed, as he flew the PIT-ITH route regularly and occasionally PIT-Binghamton. Of course he rarely did a connection since PIT was his origination and final destination. I flew PIT-ITH once and can't imagine the insanity of trying to connect in PHL for this short hop (and backtracking). Driving it is a pain too, so this really leaves no good options for folks traveling to any of these three cities from PIT, WVA or OH and points west (not that there are throngs but...).

Makes no sense why they didn't fly these routes into PIT to take advantage of the flight banking that still exisits at PIT. It's not like there is crowding or air traffic restrictions at any of these APs, so you would imagine that they could've scheduled these at anytime that would be conducive to easier, logical connections.

Maybe Northwest will start flying DTW-ITh/ELM/Binghamton

bigred93

They already have. NW flies DTW - ITH twice a day, scheduled nicely into all the schedules out of DTW. They didn't get there on their own. A local group in Ithaca including Cornell banded together to provide revenue guarantees to NW for the flight, and the airport and county provided some marketing money. Prices have been pretty reasonable and load factors have been very high, and since the route feeds into a lot of international routes, especially to Asia, profits to NW have been significantly above expectations.

Only about 60% of air trips that have ITH as their ultimate origin or destination fly through the ITH airport. The others pay the $200 r/t cab fare to SYR (or take the bus there, or drive) because of more rational fares up there. NW has driven down fares on a lot of ITH routes, and has driven up overall load factors at the airport considerably. I'm not sure if $244 r/t to ORD is profitable or not, but I can guarantee you a lot more folks are going to fly that over the $953 r/t I have scheduled next week to BWI on US. And I guarantee you the brain trust in Tempe is scratching their head wondering about the 30 - 40% load factors on their ITH flights, at $450 cheapest r/t to LGA and $550 r/t to PHL. It's called price elasticity of demand, people... when you raise the price to $953 r/t to BWI, there's only 1 idiot willing to pay the freight (who just happens to be me).

jimcfsus

On a related topic, Colgan lost the ESA route for JHW/BFD to PIT. One of the CO express carriers picked it up and will fly 3 flights to CLE instead.

As a native of the BFD area, this will be a sad day without US service in upstate PA.

radarman

New to flyertalk; thought this article might add to the topic.

http://www.pressconnects.com/apps/pb...603250323/1002

This tells you something when US lost 26.8% when they cut back PIT in 2004. My guess is many people have moved on to other carriers since the first cutback, rather than go through PHL.

The 2004 pullback of PIT did not leave too many options for connecting in the once great hub; it's very sad that we are now stuck with only PHL again. (No flights to Charlotte from BGM, ITH, ELM)