Its all done in our single biggest fleet type, the DC-9-10, all of which are outsourced to the lowest bidder off our seniority list.

Funny thing is not that long ago when the bus was going the LGA-BOS portion, tons of flights were over 100 pax and the landed gentry up that way was saying mainline was going to get DCA back too. Then suddenly it all became the outsourced DC-9-10's.

What probably happened was marketing ran the averages as if it was just a regular city pair, and found the per flight demand to be comfortably under 76 seats so they "right sized" it to the DC-9-10 at DCI. But the peak flights that were over that mean after the switch we started turning customers away, and the ones we kept are on an inferior outsourced product. Airways still runs 100 seater mainline E190's on it and A319's on DCA. DL has yielded the bulk of the market to them while turning away peak pax (many of which happen to be ultra HVC's) and driving others to the competition where they then gain FF miles on another system.

Rumor is 717 to get some or all of it back, but I'll believe it when I see it.