Crew bases and passenger hubs aren’t the same thing.

This continues to fall on deaf ears….

There’s some tie in though. To make it economically viable it generally needs to be a city with a decent amount of overnighting crews and/or enough connectivity that they can inject reserves into the system. That tends to lend itself to the same sort of cities that we hub for passengers but it doesn’t have to be.

Gee whiz, All hubs are crew bases but not all crew bases are hubs. Kinda like how all squares are rectangles

Crew Bases do not need connectivity…. What you need is a lot of RONs requires a lot of hotels and a ton of flights to hubs, bonus points if the station is a MX base.That’s what your outstation crew bases look like. Hence is why MCO/TPA makes sense with the sheer volume of flights from both TPA/MCO to hubs. LAS makes sense with the large volume of flights to hubs. Other good candidates would be BOS, PHX, and SEA.

You staff the base to the appropriate size for the volume of flights….

I think we will see 777 ORD or 777 DEN before we see any new bases. If we do it’ll most likely be BOS, especially if 67 passes and retirements/ hiring slows, if not a I think phx is a possibility

any word on when tpa will be a “co” base?

The CBA opens the door for it, no idea on the timeline of when…

When you open PBS bid and see trips originating and terminating in TPA :-)

I don't have hard numbers and this is just my gut speaking, but as has been mentioned above the company may have opened MCO and LAS partially because it helps keep the captain training pipeline filled. Adding SEA back could be more of the same.