Originally Posted by
BigGuns
Because farmer Joe driving 4 hours once a year to fly to LAS or MCO makes a ton of money for Delta. BTW... 30 million people is more than the population of MI, OH, IN combined. Maybe there a lot of people in Canada I don't know about!
I would rather have the 9 million that live with in 1:30 of ORD, that's the population of the entire state of MI!
There are a lot of farmer Joe's with a six figure pension retired from auto jobs flying on the routes you mention.
Although, all of the seats from DTW to LAS and MCO combined are less than the amount of seats to Asia and Europe.
As I typed "I believe the statistic is..." for a reason, the actual population number might be something like 20,000,000 in a 3 hour drive. Whatever it is, it's a lot, and it's not sharing a delay-prone facility with two massive competitors and an LCC seven miles away with options to anywhere in the USA.
All I'm saying is, with DTW being nearly a monopoly, it's worth keeping. DTW is an outstation for all other carriers flying in except for Spirit, but SWA at MDW is a lot larger than the Spirit operation at DTW. And United at ORD.