Originally Posted by
rickair7777
Have you tried to lease gates at LAX lately? Good luck with that...
With traffic congestion rising at all large cities, it will be harder to consolidate all of your flying at a few large hubs. A really ideal hub needs several things...
- Location, for international launches and regional feed
- Lots of originating traffic (either a large city, or tourist destination)
- Plenty of available gates and arrival capacity.
- Good Wx (most airlines ignore this one)
- Minimal ATC issues.
PHX and LAS are almost perfect hubs...their only slight drawback is that it takes 50 minutes to get "feet wet" for trans-pacific work.
Actually PHX and LAS would be good hubs for transpacific flights. Remember the whole earth-is-not-flat thing... so really flying from LAS to Tokio is the same distance as flying LAX-Tokio (30 miles or so difference).
In fact, SLC is a much better hub to serve Asia than LAX. Apart from the congestion in LAX, SLC is closer to ALL Asian destinations than LAX is.
Although SLC is over 2 hours away from "getting your feet wet", it ends up being closer to Hong Kong, Bejing, Bangkok, Tokio, Seul and Singapore than LAX. (remember Seul is KoreanAir's hub....codeshare partner in SkyTeam with Delta)
Bottom line: as far as range considerations for transpacific flights, LAX/SLC/LAS/PHX are all more or less equal (with SLC being the best).
Now of course, anyone who has flown out of SLC knows perfectly well that this location advantage of SLC is more than nullified by the sh!ttiest and most inefficient ATC service on the planet.... so maybe SLC is not that good of an idea in the end.