Originally Posted by
ERflyer
Many of those medium size European city pairs never made much money. Other routes like Amman, Cairo, and Moscow went away for obvious geopolitical reasons. Istanbul is gone due to not making money because of competition from Turkish Air.
In short, Delta has shifted from a poorly run airline to a well run pragmatic airline since bankruptcy and the merger.
I miss all those destinations. I like a PTIX of $6-8B a year.
Our AF partner flies 4 mainline flights a day from CDG-SVO and KLM flies 2 mainlines and Aeroflot does 3 including with a 330. Our Aeroflot partner flies more from AMS too. AF flies an A340 to Cairo. You're right about Turkish Air as they've absolutely flooded that market. Some of those markets have a LOT of capacity from our partners and with as large a travel market as the US is, it seems like some of those markets more than supports an ER's worth direct.
It would be interesting to see the total "team" ways to get to all the places we used to fly to as well as to see the number of pax to/from the US for those markets. Major spreadsheet ninja stuff there and I'm not going to do the grunt work but I'm sure its available. Obviously not all would be justified with international directs. Its also notable that if any could be supported by us direct but is instead funneled through partner hubs, its almost always less block hours that we then share for that market (US-CDG only etc) vs the more block hours we would have done ourselves (US-SVO etc) and then add up the totals.
It seems like the "re-kitting" on those routes to funnel through CDG/AMS is more of a win for AF/KML pilots than us. Obviously we wouldn't carry huge losses on some of those markets that wouldn't support a direct, however it seems like some of them would especially seasonally. Instead we split those shorter stage lengths with AF/KML (and maybe Alitalia on and off who knows) and then they get 100% of the additional block hours/ASKMs/etc to our former destinations.
Kind of makes it seem like we should get a greater than 50% deal versus the "half" that's always defined as the absolute rock bottom of the allowable floor in the nonexistant window becaue we'll never break through the top of that window anyway.