That's what I mean. More 737 positions and possibly 320 and Widebody.

MCO would make a lot of sense. DL has ATL and AA has MIA. UA doesn’t have any SE hub. Terminal C has space to launch WBs and Spirit is talking about “right sizing” the airline so who knows if they reduce their footprint there.

I know there’s market for MCO to Europe and South America. DL currently runs Orlando to Amsterdam, British to Gatwick, and Virgin to Heathrow. All with solid loads. I believe that UA can be a force to be reckoned with if they decided to do a hub out of MCO.

SA to MCO might be a niche. European leisure travel isn't high yield, but there's a lot of weathly south americans who like disney.
Still have a hard time imagining MCO as a hub because where are the connecting passengers coming from and where will they be going? Nashville to San Juan? ATL and CLT make such sense because ther are in the middle of the SE US not at one corner. MIA makes sense as a funnel to points south and because of the inherent size of south florida.

At some point it's not as much about local traffic. It's more about real estate. AA's traffic in CLT is 85% transient.

Sending NB and WB from MCO going south makes more sense then sending it all from EWR and IAD (especially when NE has weather issues).

MIA makes sense but MCO doesn't? MCO carried 600,000 more pax than MIA last year. The Miami metro area is at 6.1 million but it's not like Orlando is a slouch at 4.1 million. Considering will be a shared hub and Tampa's metro area is another 3.0 million people I don't see why it wouldn't work to fill in a massive hole in our network.

It would. People don't realize MIA and MCO markets and numbers changed quite a bit in the last few years. It's to the point that bringing C terminal to full 60 gates is already overdue if they'd start doing all the construction right now...
MCO is far from MCO 10 years ago.

OR closed DEN 757 base, displaced everyone, then launced daily service to multiple HI islands from DEN on the 757 (had been Sat only previously). So they re-opened a "new" DEN 757 base. LOL

Two hours to get to a gate the other day. At least one other United aircraft exceeded the DOT three hours, so I felt lucky. The whole time we were waiting for them to push two heavies and the ramper kept saying it should be about 10 minutes anytime someone asked… Absolutely embarrassing

And a 767 base too (did my OE out of there) but we were getting crushed by American. And to build up to something remotely competetive to them in today's world would burn a lot of money with no guarantee it would pay off in the long run.

if you want to argue about decisions in the 1990's to not scale up MIA more, have at it. But the decision to close MIA in 2004 was the right one based on the current and past performance. Sucks for those that were there, but im sure the folks in CLE or HNL or SEA would love to have their old lives back too.

Maybe not so much MCO doesn't make sense but growing it to a scale that makes sense is gonna be challening. AA has a huge latin american operation - like 6 cities in Cuba, 6 in Colombia etc. And they have a huge regional operation feeding pax from all over the SE quadrant of the US. MCO is not gonna compete for BHM-RIC type traffic - it's either going to be MCO O&D fighting Southwest, Jetblue, Frontier, etc or trying to collect people from Chicago and Dulles and Nashville going to Bogota ... fighting American. That's gonna need a lot of scale.