Originally Posted by
FrankCobretti
I'm surprised that everyone's surprised that the new LGA flying is mostly RJs. Most of USAir's flying out of there was RJs, and the RJ writing on the wall was so clear that my captain and I discussed whether the slot swap would actually benefit us pilots months and months ago.
What, was everyone not paying attention?
Yes, although USAir was also losing money trying to fly the biggest O&D market in the galaxy on high CASM fuel sucking RJ's to begin with. Duplicating their failed business plan was hardly the goal I thought. Meanwhile JB is dominating NYC domestic with an all mainline product with inherently lower CASM and that's almost exclusively out of JFK, where NY'ers supposedly don't really even want to fly. LGA is supposed to be super premium NYC flying yet we can't even put our smallest mainline planes on 90-something percent of the new routes.
As for the terminal bridge, I'm sure we will be bussing pax between the two while the bridge is built, but like I mentioned earlier, I don't expect a whole lot of connections there in the first place. Very few routes flow well through NYC for that and those that do can be done through other hubs just as easily in most cases anyway. The slot swap was primarily about single point O&D and the fact that its 90-something percent outsourced RJ's means mainline won't get very much "feed" in the first place. As an added bonus, we could see down-gauging in JFK and EWR as a result of this if the O&D pax really do prefer LGA. Just enough to outsource, not quite enough to justify mainline. High CASM, inferior product, few to no additional Delta pilot jobs. This is shaping up to make the AS code share check valve look like a good deal. At least we get some widebody feed from the mass outsourcing and narrow-body stagnation on the west coast. All we will get in LGA is supposedly revenue that we hope we will get a piece of. As if we haven't fallen for that trick before.
