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NEW YORK - American Airlines and management consultants McKinsey & Co. looked at the feasibility of closing down one of American's five cornerstone markets to see if that would pay off for the struggling airline, a McKinsey executive said Wednesday.

But the analysis showed that such a step would hurt the company, said Alexander Dichter, head of McKinsey's airline practice.

American in late 2009 embraced its cornerstone strategy, which called for focusing its flights on Dallas/Fort Worth, Miami, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, and exiting markets that didn't have flights to or from airports in those cities. At present, about 98 percent of American's flights go to or from the cornerstones.

That strategy has drawn fire from a number of industry analysts, who question the wisdom of American attempting to grow its presence in the hotly contested markets of New York, Los Angeles and, to a lesser extent Chicago.

Dichter said McKinsey's analysis considered two alternatives. The first called for American to abandon one of its cornerstones and reduce its flying capacity accordingly. The second also looked at abandoning a cornerstone market, but having American deploy that market's capacity to the other four cornerstones.

The firm's study showed that American would see "very strong negative results for both those scenarios," he said, with financial results well below American's targets for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and airplane rents.

"Based on the strength of that analysis, we dropped that analysis," Dichter said.

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We boarded to find a CRJ in terrible condition. The bulkhead was threadbare. There were multiple holes in each seatback pocket. The lighting was dirty with stains. The safety placards were all worn down. Delta should have been embarrassed to have ExpressJet flying this airplane under the Delta name....We went into the Sky Priority line and a woman at the counter shouted a question whether we had checked in at the kiosk. We told her no, because we wanted to see if we could make this change. She told us that we had to get in the other line to do that. I asked what the point of Sky Priority was, and she said something about how they don’t really do that.

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