American loses 4 gates to United at ORD.
 

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/airl...cuts-americans

Did they forget about these gates or something like those slots in JFK? Either way it's another failure by the usual suspects in charge. They claim they are going to fight this but they tried to fight the NEalliance and lost as well as the Latam JV.

I think those gates were ran by Air Wisconsin. I could be wrong though.

Not sure that is quite it.

This podcast explains the gate assignment system at ORD.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1bf...RrCO1Z7zaTdnwg

Starting to understand why they added so much on ORD. It was an attempt to squat the slots.

Maybe this is my ignorance or misunderstanding of the ORD gate distribution, but this seems to me like something that will accelerate. It seems like that if more usage = more gates, then losing gates will create less usage, which means AA will lose more gates, which will result in less usage, etc.

Could this become a snowball effect? Maybe I'm just misreading their methodology.

Any chance of cutting/pasting article as it is behind a pay wall?

Is this why they're using the airport construction as an excuse for slower growth?

They can't be that dumb, even in that city. Pretty soon no airlines would have any gates.

It's going to come down to actual utilization of the gates you do have, possibly/likely modified for whatever their market goals are, such as regional feed, more Europe, more west coast, whatever they think benefits the city's economy. Of possibly just whatever brings in the most direct revenue to the airport authority... if they're not properly managed by the local political leaders, airports will naturally drift to prioritize the benefit of the organization itself, vice the city or citizens.

This is not how it works. For example, let's say AA has 30 gates and 25 flights. AA loses 5 gates because the gate:flight ratio required is 1:1. Now AA has 25 gates and 25 flights, no further reductions occur.

So no, a snowball effect is not likely here.

but gate efficiency generally increases with more gates. it’s easier to shove 120 flights into 100 gates than it is to shove 12 flights into 10 gates in the same amount of time. flexibility…