And it's not ATL crews doing it? Quick!! Call Crew resources.. something got by 'em...

LGA is slot controlled. Use or lose. Cut your congestion in half? Not gonna happen. The slots are what they are.

Did you read the Flight Ops piece on building a New York hub? Things like increasing mainline block hours by 50% over the last few years, or adding 50% more mainline seats? We still have to build a terminal that works as a connecting hub (C to D connector) and renovate a bunch of space. There is very little "growth" opportunity other than upgauging over time. UniCal has a great hub in EWR (EWR and great?), but when you look at what Delta has done as a competitor in NYC it's good news for Delta pilots. The terminal and slots will ultimately make it better.

Yeah lets win NYC:rolleyes:

Something I think we all knew, now we have statistics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/bu...ll-delays.html

Small excerpt:

In the first half of 2011, the region’s airspace — defined as the big three airports, plus Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, which caters to corporate jets, and Philadelphia International Airport — handled 12 percent of all domestic flights but accounted for nearly half of all delays in the nation. In the same period in 2005, they represented just a third of all delays, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

These delays ripple across the country. A third of all delays around the nation each year are caused, in some way, by the New York airports, according to the F.A.A. Or, as Paul McGraw, an operations expert with Airlines for America, the industry trade group, put it, “When New York sneezes, the rest of the national airspace catches a cold.”

Another side bit in that memo was the LGA-MSY flight which started out as an RJ but is now a 319. Perhaps we will fly something bigger on the LGA DFW legs! I guess I'll have to be patient, which goes against most pilot tendencies!:eek:

They will need to upgauge those flights to add any capacity. Right now we are at or close to the floors on the RJ contracts. Many of those CPA's decrease the number of jets in the contracts in the next few years.

The airspace is getting more constrained, and that leads to larger gauge with less frequency. Difficult to stomach, so lets hope we see growth or the jets we currently fly.

On the DFW thing; When they first announced the LGA slot swap it was to be two E-series jets and two MD-90's. That would make commuting to NYC a lot easier.

Sorry I didn't explain it in terms simple enough for you to understand.

Thankfully i think others could follow the rather simple logic that we could free our slots and gates up so as to use them on other places.

It's a thought on how to raise mainline from a mere 8% of the new flying to something higher, like maybe 16%!!!! Or is that aiming too high? Out of touch?

Probably. I don't think you believe a double digit percentage increase in anything good for mainline is possible.

I'll type slowly for the Auburn grad...

I guess you didn't see the part in the piece on hub building about us having to compete for passengers, right? Meaning we swapped slots and got terminals, but the terminals don't connect...yet. That USAirways old pax can still get around going through DCA, PHL, and CLT and don't have to use us. Just because we got the slots and facilities didn't mean we got their pax. You understand that, right? That everything won't be together for a connecting hub until next year? And that after everything is together network will match capacity with demand, because it's a slot constrained airport, so the only growth is through upgauging. Right?

Is that simple enough for you to understand?;)

Typing slowly doesn't matter on a post. When you hit submit it all posts at once. Typing slowly just makes you look... like a slow typer. Just saying. ;)

Each E145, CRJ200, CRj700 and CRJ900 takes up space. Do we need direct E145 service from LGA-ALB and CRJ700 LGA-BTV. BTV is on the way to ALB, take a MD88, take up 1 gate and 1 slot. What to do with the extra slot? Sure we could always use extra slots in LGA.

In simple terms you'd allocate 8 first class and 67ish coach seats to each city, although you could play with that I'm sure. So on CRJ900 type routes it's almost a direct replacement, on others we add a little non-rev space and lots of cargo capacity.

Now competitively what are we offering when we do that? Mainline service plus you don't have to go south on a 2 hour block flight to connect to go back north or west of LGA where a lot of these flights are going. And mainline one stop (not connecting though) should win over passengers over a Dash 8, E145, CRJ200, CRJ700, CRJ900 (maybe not E-jets but thats a different story). Works for SWA.

Hence, clear the unnecessary congestion. Service 3 or 4 airports from 2 gates and 2 slots and free the rest to make money elsewhere.

Funny, I was thinking about this last week. I remember taking Delta in 2000 from CVG-Jackson, MS to SHV on a 737-200. Nice mainline service. Our turn in Jackson was fast and we barely noticed it. Certainly faster than making a connection in ATL or wherever if we had wanted a direct flight to SHV.

You could also make that flight a CVG-JAN-SHV-ATL, and sell tickets JAN-SHV (prob not a lot of takers but...) and JAN-ATL (with a stop in SHV). I think it's an untapped market our of LGA.

Sure - someone will pipe up and say that why do what we can operated with a 70/76 seater to both places at once. Well - those things cost a lot more than a mainline jet and don't generate the revenue premium anymore.

Thank you for the change in tone.

I don't know the cost benefit of adding 34 additional seats between those two markets by upgauging to an 88 from the planned RJ combo. They are currently USAirways serviced by 50 seat RJ's and 34 seat turboprops, so they're already getting a signficant capacity increase.