IADCAflyer

I'm not sure its going to be drastic...It will be reduced, but not drastic.

Expect LHR, CDG, FRA, MAD. Variables are TXL or DUS.

IADCAflyer

Why does anyone think you will see major drawdowns at CLT? Its one of -two- remaining hubs in the southeast - an area that covers 70,000,000.

PIT and PHL overlapped on 70%+ of routes. PHL and CLT are much less overlapping.

kudzu

Spot on ^

If anything, I fear what CLT may do to itself with the current (and nasty) political fight for airport control. If low cost/efficiency goes away, CLT would no longer be as attractive. US has a master airport lease only through 2016, so new AA does have options.

ty97

The AA/BA TATL JV does just that out of NYC, BOS, and ORD. From ORD, it's AA that operates the day flight (AA90). From JFK, both AA (AA142) and BA run day flights (though I think I read that the AA day flight will cease for a while during airplane interior retrofits). From BOS, BA is running the day flight.

McFlyPHL

Two things:
1) The people who pay the majority of the dollars *DO* care about arriving fresh for business.

2) Arriving at the crack of dawn, wiped out and going to a hotel that doesn't have a room isn't something anyone likes. A room is less likely to be available for a non-status leisure traveler. Most folks I know who are coach flyers will pop an Ambien on an overnight TATL flight in Y. You can't do that on a flight that's 5:48.

dtremit

It would be nice if they added one from PHL, but I'm not sure I can see that happening given the EU's condition on the merger.

mrwise

There has been a LOT of discussion on what hubs the new AA will maintain, but seems to me nobody is talking about what in flight amenities the new AA will provide? For instance, is the new airline going to maintain the old AA's service levels, like more flexible meal policies, on board IFE, etc, or will it be 'downgraded' to US's service levels with regards to no IFE, meals only after 3.5 hrs, etc? I can surely live without a hub or two in the network, but I would really like to keep the on board IFE! Flying one of UA's newly upgraded planes with IFE was great, spent the whole flight playing virtual blackjack ^ Will the new AA allow me to do the same?

BoeingBoy

Says the type of folks sitting in their upgrade to Envoy seat. FFs are no different than most folks - if they can get a cheaper seat on their preferred carrier they will. Yes, FFs fly more frequently, often a lot more frequently, but $ spent per trip isn't generally much higher than the leisure traveler. So take that Envoy flight to XYZ European destination. The $ for coach fare are about the same, the cert gets the free Envoy seat, you don't pay for checked bags, where's the "majority of dollars" when there's 2 or more coach leisure passengers in the back with the rest of the unwashed masses for each one of you. Plus US spends more on the Envoy passenger - several times more. Then there the number of flights taken - the important number is $spend per flight. Just flying a plane from X to Y costs an awful lot of money.

The "who pays a subsidy for who" in air travel is one of those chicken and egg things. FF or once every 2 years leisure traveler would fly a lot less and spend a lot less if the people on the other side weren't there. So spare me the "I fly so much that I support US while the riffraff is subsidized by me" speech. Every person on any airplane is important - take a couple off each flight and US or any airline is hemorrhaging money.

Jim

lizs

I'm really surprised by how excited the employees all seem about this merger. Many FA's, a few employees on a DFW-PHX flight I was sitting by who are involved with the merge, everyone. Has Dougie just somehow gotten everyone to drink the kool-aid, or what's going on?

Also, since it might have gotten lost, one of those employees said estimated date to leave *A is late January. I didn't get any other details from her as far as getting credit for trips booked before then, etc.

TRAVELSIG

That seems quite optimistic- however I can imagine that now the decision has been made there will be a push to get this completed as soon as possible.

Between QR joining OW and US moving to OW this year will prove to have been quite a coup and big win to One World and not the best of years for the Star Alliance.

yankervitch

At CMU here - we used the traffic data that US and PIT used to evaluate whether or not to build out PIT if PIT were to become a hub city. The prof used it as a case study of check your assumptions - even with some confidence intervals put on previous years of data, what ended up happening post-9/11 in terms of real traffic numbers with the collapse of the PIT market was considered "extremely unlikely". The prof revealed the provenance of the numbers at the end of class and warned us all to never utter the US airways name at a yinzer unless we wanted to get cursed out!

The problem (from a data point of view, not looking at the politics involved) was that the market is dependent on the regional and national economy doing well. Margins at US (and for that matter, most airlines) were not sufficient to weather the shock and general economic downturn after 9/11, and entering bankruptcy allowed US to get away from its commitments to maintain flight traffic at certain levels while sticking Allegheny and the 'burgh with the rest of the cost to expand PIT.

FWIW, I really like PIT - it does make me a little sad when I walk to the end of some of the terminals, though, and see the thin layer of dust on the seats.

AZ Travels the World

On the US side, he bought them. Well, actually, he bought them on both sides. That's how he's about go from running America West Airlines to CEO of the largest airline in the world. Exceptionally well played, in my view.

Parker (why do we need to call him 'Dougie?') committed to significantly raising the pay of pilots and flight attendants in the New American. The executive staff you sat with are making the same leap Parker is.

What's not to like?

eponymous_coward

The majority of the profit, perhaps (A J pax is significantly more profitable than a Y pax, this is why Michael O'Leary won't have Ryanair do TATL without... um... extra services - warning, there's explicit language at that link). But not the majority of the dollars- airlines would go out of business very quickly with full J cabins and empty Y cabins. (Note that even SQ can't sustain all-J flights on their routes; the only airlines that can fly Europe-JFK, and it's a TINY amount of capacity- BA and LX on two routes.)

And 5h48m to Europe from the East Coast sounds like a dream in Y...

FWAAA

US Airways has been profitable lately almost entirely because of its industry-lagging payrates, particularly the pilots and FAs. US pilots are paid less than nonunion jetblue pays its pilots. Even with the bankruptcy-induced concessions, AA's pilots and FAs still earn considerably more money than similar US Airways flight crew. Not 5% or 10% more, but 25% to 40% more (the pilots).

So when Parker offered the US pilots pay and benefit increases of $1.6 billion over six years (retroactive to Feb 13), the US pilots were eagerly onboard. The US FAs ratified big payraises earlier this year on their own, but they stand to earn a bunch more as AA FAs with the AA contract. When US offered huge payraises (and lots more shiny widebodies to far-away places than US could ever hope to acquire on its own), the US employees are understandably ecstatic about the merger.

Over at AA, Parker offered all AA employees small raises that help wipe out some of the bankruptcy concessions, and that makes AA employees very excited about the merger. On top of that, the AA CEO, Tom Horton, is viewed as the Devil by many of the AA union leaders and employees and since he's been fired by Doug Parker, many AA employees are on cloud nine.

Of course, the employees have forgotten that every merger involves some redundancies and inevitable job losses. The employees don't seem to grasp that US was profitable mostly because of its low pay and that new AA's profitability may be endangered by raising the pay of all 90,000 union employees at the new airline. AA filed for bankruptcy primarily to jam the more efficient pilot and FA contracts down the employees' throats, and along comes Parker promising to raise the labor costs of the combined airline. "Revenue synergies and cost-savings synergies" are the promised sources of all this higher employee cost. Uh, yeah. We'll revisit this in a couple of years and see how well it's worked out.

GTITAN

Well on the bright side all, I have been an AA EXP, and it was by far, the best non-revenue based, airline status that I ever ejnoyed. Moreover, if AA keeps it promise, SWUs to HKG are in the future. If it is inevitable, we might as well accentuate the positives.

Safe Travels