Originally Posted by
ROTORGUY
AUS would be great for all the displaced HOU FO’s. I would imagine it would greatly benefit the HOU and DAL folks. Lots of guys living in the Austin, San Antonio area will be happy if that’s true. I was thinking it would be MCI but more and more people are saying AUS. I see Delta is trying to make a run for AUS so I would imagine we will try to get as many of the new gates as possible but that what 4-5 years out?
I personally don't see any way AUS will ever be a base. It is halfway in between the two geographically closest bases in the system in a N/S orientation that regularly gets schwacked by a single line of thunderstorms. It is the San Diego of Texas. Actually, it's even less likely than San Diego because both of those super close Texas crew bases actually serve Austin. There are tons of departures and overnighting aircraft, but zero reason to base crews. It just became a maintenance location, it doesn't even have full time maintenance there. All these rumors are started by the many pilots who have lived there for a long time and are always super hopeful that they will get picked.
Stick with the usual suspects. STL and MCI are great mid-continent connectors with obvious infrastructure benefits. Trying to figure out the company bread crumbs is dumb. SAN has had more daily departures than ATL for a long time, but because of where it sits on the map, it has never gotten the nod. Same with AUS.