Quote:
Originally Posted by skyscraperpage17
As far as the bolded, my understanding is that CVG had well over 200 flights per day back in the early 2000s, and is not down to about 85-90 flights today. BOS is in a similar situation, having lost a significant number of daily flights. Even DTW and MSP have lost over 100 flights per day since the NWA merger. For example, I can't speak for MSP, but I do know DTW always has a ton of capacity that's underutilized on a typical day while Delta's busying lining up a ton of airplanes on the tarmac in Atlanta where they can't build additional gate fast enough to handle the traffic.
Also, the Memphis and Dallas hubs (both operating well over 200 flights per day) were shuttered completely.
It's not about what they've able to squeeze through Atlanta, but that they have a disproportionate amount of their operations reliant on one airport compared to the other airlines and leave themselves suspectible to disruptions much more so than the other airlines, which makes situations such as the recent power outage far more severe than they should be.
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Again, you have a basic misunderstanding of the dynamics here. I'll preface this by saying that I actually do what we call Air Service Development for a living. What we are talking about is what I do every day. I say that only in hopes that it provides some credibility for what I am about to explain below.
You are correct that Delta downsized a few hubs bother pre- and post- merger with Northwest. DFW was closed because it was an economic disaster and Delta was on the road to Chapter 11. There was not an alternative course of action here and it had nothing to do with putting all the eggs in the ATL basket. American Airlines and Southwest Airlines simply dominated the Metroplex market and Delta had no ability to compete give the economic environment.
CVG and MEM were closed after the merger because DTW and ATL were simply better hubs that accomplished the same network functions. Their scale was too small and their local markets were not big enough to support hubs in the evolving competitive environment.
But those resources DID NOT go into ATL. Those resources instead were focused on other major initiatives. Delta organically built hubs at SEA, LAX and LGA that are strategically and economically for more important than CVG and MEM could ever be. Additionally, Delta has grown dramatically in RDU and BOS, both of which are now larger than CVG. Delta will take possession of five more BOS gates over the next three year, so more growth can be expected there. In addition, JFK has gone from about 75 daily flights to about 225 over the past decade.
DTW and MSP have actually pretty much maintained their relative positions in terms of size and scope. You are making a common mistake in analyzing the size of the operation. You are using number of flights instead of capacity. As Delta has phased out 50-seat regional jets and replaced them with 76 and 110 seat aircraft, it has reduced the number of overall frequencies in those markets in order to maintain relative capacity discipline, but overall seats are pretty stable.
No airline is going to grow a hub simply because there is gate space available at various points in the day. That is economic suicide. MSP and, particularly, DTW are limited by competitive forces and the local economic environment. The Detroit economy took a huge shock and has grown more slowly than Atlanta ever since. Additionally, DTW (a primarily east-west flow hub) competes for the same traffic flows as many other regional hubs, including ORD, MDW, DEN and MSP. ATL's only significant competition from a network perspective is CLT. All of this combined puts a cap on the amount of growth that DTW can economically support. That has nothing to do with ATL.
ATL has fantastic geography for a hub (able to do east-west very effectively, but really dominates the high volume north-south corridor. Additionally, Atlanta has strong population and economic growth as well as a mix of employment industries that are far more travel-oriented than Detroit's.
Delta currently has about $8 BILLION in airport investment underway in markets other than ATL. ATL is the engine that makes Delta go, but Delta's reliance on ATL has actually shrunk dramatically since the NW merger and will continue to do so into the future.
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