Quote:
The HND slot pairs (all 4 pairs issued to AA, HA and DAL) are at the edge of commercial viability, in that (with the exception of AA due to their codeshare with JAL) they cannot connect beyond traffic due to their late hours of assignment. It's all O&D to Tokyo. JAL and ANA own 96% of the slots into the airport. If DAL could move the entire NRT operation to HND (about 26 slot pairs per day) with appropriate slot times, the performance of our Pacific hub would skyrocket. HND/NRT is very similar to LHR/LGW. One is the clearly preferred business airport. The other has been relegated to low yield leisure traffic. Delta used to be fairly big into LGW. Now we don't fly there, and it's because it has substantially lower fares than the preferred airport.
What AA/JAL, UAL/ANA, and the Japanese government want is to piecemeal Delta's NRT hub to death. As Nu points out, take away the ability to connect in Japan and take away the ability to provide O&D to Japanese in all directions, the NRT hub crumbles. The other two alliances can codeshare across networks so they would have substantially greater offerings. Delta has no codeshare partner (and this was one of the primary reasons for management's run at JAL while in bankruptcy, imo), so if HND is "liberalized" with just a few more slots then Delta will lose high yield traffic to the other two alliances. That makes the NRT hub not work.
The Japanese government just put about $12 billion into JAL. That government has an activist airline policy and is not about to see their investment go bad. We on the other hand don't have a national airline policy nor a coherent governmental strategy to protect good US jobs.
Helpful?
Originally Posted by slowplay
DTW-HND didn't work because of the timing of the slots and no beyond network. NRT works because of the ability to connect beyond NRT. Also, HND was directly cannibalizing high yield traffic from DTW-NRT. Not much additional traffic was being stiumulated due to the bad slot times.The HND slot pairs (all 4 pairs issued to AA, HA and DAL) are at the edge of commercial viability, in that (with the exception of AA due to their codeshare with JAL) they cannot connect beyond traffic due to their late hours of assignment. It's all O&D to Tokyo. JAL and ANA own 96% of the slots into the airport. If DAL could move the entire NRT operation to HND (about 26 slot pairs per day) with appropriate slot times, the performance of our Pacific hub would skyrocket. HND/NRT is very similar to LHR/LGW. One is the clearly preferred business airport. The other has been relegated to low yield leisure traffic. Delta used to be fairly big into LGW. Now we don't fly there, and it's because it has substantially lower fares than the preferred airport.
What AA/JAL, UAL/ANA, and the Japanese government want is to piecemeal Delta's NRT hub to death. As Nu points out, take away the ability to connect in Japan and take away the ability to provide O&D to Japanese in all directions, the NRT hub crumbles. The other two alliances can codeshare across networks so they would have substantially greater offerings. Delta has no codeshare partner (and this was one of the primary reasons for management's run at JAL while in bankruptcy, imo), so if HND is "liberalized" with just a few more slots then Delta will lose high yield traffic to the other two alliances. That makes the NRT hub not work.
The Japanese government just put about $12 billion into JAL. That government has an activist airline policy and is not about to see their investment go bad. We on the other hand don't have a national airline policy nor a coherent governmental strategy to protect good US jobs.
Helpful?
So, what's left of Northwest? Minneapolis, Detroit and the parts of LAX and SEA not full of Alaska tails?
What are our options, other than the retreat across the Pacific that Richard Branson told us was going to happen two years ago?