Domestic flying in the USA

Quote: pacomartin

Do you suspect your hometown airport is overpriced? I've heard a lot of people complain about Newark, where do fares rank on a national list. The most recent ranking of average airport fares shows the average domestic fare out of Houston Bush airport to be 277% that of Atlantic City, NJ. Ranking of airports is done by number of origin domestic passengers (not including international and connecting passengers). So Atlanta which is normally the busiest airport in the USA is now ranked #3 since so many passengers are connecting flights. LAX is now #1. Fares are for domestic flights only.

Wouldn't those rankings also be greatly affected by the distances of the flights from each airport? The JFK, LAG and EWR figures are a good example of that.

Quote: P90

Most people can't. It's not hard to learn to pack light, and after a while it becomes automatic. You don't struggle cramming everything you need into a small carry-on bag, you just don't see a need for more.
Of course it depends on where you're going... but as long as it's not a special event and not Alaska.

I usually can do a weekend gambling trip with a small totebag. I always check the local thrift shops out online before I travel and pick up extra duds there if needed. Savers on W Sahara is a favorite of mine.

Quote: SanchoPanza

Wouldn't those rankings also be greatly affected by the distances of the flights from each airport? The JFK, LAG and EWR figures are a good example of that.

Not as much as you may think. Only the off price airlines have a strong correlation between distance and price. Most of the other airlines base price on other things.

Sometimes you will pay more to fly through a city with a connection, then you will pay just to fly to the hub city alone.

Quote: P90

Most people can't. It's not hard to learn to pack light, and after a while it becomes automatic. You don't struggle cramming everything you need into a small carry-on bag, you just don't see a need for more.
Of course it depends on where you're going... but as long as it's not a special event and not Alaska.

Sometimes it takes motivation to learn. When I moved cross-country I had to shrink what I needed from fitting in a house to fitting in a Hyundai. Makes you see how little you really need and use.

Quote: pacomartin

With Texas's 6 major airports constituting about 130-140 million passengers a year, it would be nice to imagine a mega airport in the center of all five urban areas. High speed rail would run to each city (120-150 miles) which is achievable with current Chinese technology in 30 minutes. The hypothetical airport's massive size coupled with the projected growth in Texas population means that it could become the center for supersonic and hypersonic travel. The central location in North America means it would only be a few hours from most urban centers in USA, Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean.

How do you say O'hare with a Texas accent?
Why is it Chinese technology instead of American technology?

With all the advances in electric cars and electric motorcycles, when will electric airplanes arrive and thus end the need for noise abatement by building airports in the middle of nowhere?

Quote: FleaStiff

How do you say O'hare with a Texas accent?
Why is it Chinese technology instead of American technology?

With all the advances in electric cars and electric motorcycles, when will electric airplanes arrive and thus end the need for noise abatement by building airports in the middle of nowhere?

I don't know how to say O'Hare with a Texas accent. Atlanta has been the largest airport in the world for over a decade.

It is commonly conceded that we will approach the Chinese for help with building high speed rail (if we ever build it) since no one has any experience in America.

I don't think they are even close to having the technology to develop enough thrust for take-off of a large passenger plane with electric motors. Usually I see unmanned or single pilot electric aircraft.

Quote: pacomartin

Only the off price airlines have a strong correlation between distance and price.

The example of Atlantic City can be instructive. What with Spirit Airlines posting fares as low as $9 (but more than making up for it in many other ways), the skew has to be distorted.

Quote: SanchoPanza

The example of Atlantic City can be instructive. What with Spirit Airlines posting fares as low as $9 (but more than making up for it in many other ways), the skew has to be distorted.

ACY is such a tiny airport, that it's fares don't mean much in the big picture. Houston with it's central location means that it's longest domestic flight is Seattle (1870 miles), and the majority of flights are much closer. Considering the price of fuel, you would think that fares would be lower than other airports. But fuel is not as important as competition in determining price.

Here is an idea that Air New Zealand has which they call cuddle class


The target flight is a 25 hour transit from London to New Zealand with a stop in the USA. A couple who doesn't want to shell out roughly $4K for two business class seats, will shell out and extra $220 to purchase one of these seats. What looks like a recliner seat opens up and turns the three seats into a narrow bed. Flight for two people is roughly $2K.

If you had two seats together and you pull up one ottoman, your wife could at least curl up with her head on your lap. It would beat a lot of the contortions you see people assume one the plane. It would make even cross country flights more bearable.


Part of the problem is that the airlines view every offering as a profit center today. Charge you for the soda, charge you for the pillow, charge you for the sandwich, charge you for the movie, charge for the airsick bag. They would certainly not want to give you a built in ottoman for free.

These new Singapore Airline suites will most of the challenge out of joining the mile-high club.

The 29 airports designated as "large hubs" by the FAA carry 70% of the air traffic in the country. Larg hubs are circled on the map with the following three cities having more than one large hub:
NYC: Newark, La Guardia, JFK
D.C.: Reagan National, Dulles
Chicago: O'Hare, Midway
The large hub airports with the smallest metropolitan population are: Honolulu, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Charlotte NC.

For all but a few flights, all my adult life I have driven to a large hub airport to originate travel. Are there people on the forum who drive to medium or small hubs and are happy with their travel experience? I would think that the trade-off between non-stop destinations and ease and convenience with security, traffic and baggage would sometimes favor the small airport.

A lot of those hubs have been downgraded. Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Raleigh-Durham and even Omaha, Kansas City, and Milwaukee used to be very sizable hubs. The change of course has something to do with the population shift to the South/Southwest.

It could be very convenient to live in one of those cities, with a great number of flights to every major city at multiple times during the day. It was one of the reasons corporations located there; e.g. Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati. Now, those cities are losing flights and business. One of the attractions for Boeing relocating to Chicago was the air hub of O'Hare as opposed to the relatively isolated Seattle.

Quote: teddys

A lot of those hubs have been downgraded. Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Raleigh-Durham and even Omaha, Kansas City, and Milwaukee used to be very sizable hubs. The change of course has something to do with the population shift to the South/Southwest.

Population shift, weather, and easy access to international routes are all factors. The triumvarate of Detroit , Minneapolis, and Chicago is not likely to vanish, because they fly over the arctic to get to Asia, and they have large population centers. The old center of the country (like St Louis) is not really at the center of anything anymore.

If USAirways and American Airlines merge, I assume that Charlotte will vanish as a hub. But they may scratch off Philadelphia as well, and concentrate on JFK.

USAirways
Charlotte/Douglas International Airport
Philadelphia International Airport
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport

American Airlines
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport
John F. Kennedy International Airport (New York)
Los Angeles International Airport
Miami International Airport
O'Hare International Airport (Chicago)

I am also surprised that Salt Lake City is still a large hub.

Quote: pacomartin

Here is an idea that Air New Zealand has which they call cuddle class

Holy cow that looks uncomfortable. The guy is
all scrunched up and he's not even that big.
The last time I flew home from Vegas, a family
of 4 was across the aisle from me. Two right
across, the mom and dad, and two kids in front
of them. They brought two huge brown bags
of restaurant food with them and as soon as
we were airborne, they ate. Stank up the plane
made a big mess, like they were home in the
living room. They eventually cleaned up and
the father took off his shoes, put on an eye
mask, and stretched out with his head on his
wifes lap in the window seat and his stockinged
feet sticking into the aisle, I kid you not. We
all had to walk around his feet. I've never seen
a ruder more clueless bunch of people on a
plane in my life. I wanted to smash the guy's
face by the time the flight was over.

Quote: teddys

A lot of those hubs have been downgraded. Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Raleigh-Durham and even Omaha, Kansas City, and Milwaukee used to be very sizable hubs. The change of course has something to do with the population shift to the South/Southwest.

Also the loss of major airlines. USAir used to rule PIT and the airport was totally first class. Now the place is first class but half empty. LUV has become domminant but they are a hubless carrier. I always wished PIT would play for jetBlue business and take pressure off JFK. Not to be yet.

Keep your hub, though. Delays at PIT are unheard of in most cases. <50% capacity does that.

Quote: AZDuffman

Keep your hub, though. Delays at PIT are unheard of in most cases. <50% capacity does that.

Pittsburgh is almost the textbook example. From a high of 21 million passengers 14 years ago, down to roughly 8 million today (< 40%). Outside of Toronto there are no international flights in January. But there is plenty of parking, and spacious facilities.

But you can still fly nonstop to 25/29 of the large hubs (exceptions are Honolulu, San Diego, Seattle, and Salt Lake City) plus an additional 7 smaller airports (BDL, CLE, CVG, MEM, RDU, RSW and STL).

I am sure the businesses get very upset, but it would be nice not to have a mad rush at the airport.

It does seem crazy to be talking about nearly leveling the NYC airports to rebuild them at double capacity.

Quote: pacomartin

For all but a few flights, all my adult life I have driven to a large hub airport to originate travel. Are there people on the forum who drive to medium or small hubs and are happy with their travel experience? I would think that the trade-off between non-stop destinations and ease and convenience with security, traffic and baggage would sometimes favor the small airport.

I live 30 minutes from Lambert International in St. Louis, so it's always been most convenient for me to just go from there. I've never had a problem and like the idea of not having to work my way through a mega airport like Atlanta's.

The only scenario I can imagine needing the inconvenience of driving to a different airport would be taking a long international flight that Lambert doesn't have, or only has at a bad date/time for me. Then again, I only fly on vacations, and rarely at that. If it were for business travel, the situation might be different.

Down with the hub and spoke system. Down with runways being used only at peak hours as feeder flights go into and out of the hub.

Institute Free Flight now. Treble the landing fees if a carrier has any flight arriving or departing within a half hour.

Hub and spoke is the dream of the airlines and the nightmare of the passengers.

Quote: FleaStiff

Down with the hub and spoke system.

I think that is the core of the problem. The cities of the country are having to invest billions into an inherently inefficient transport system so that the airlines can maximize profits. The system encourages the airlines to purchase small aircraft to feed the hub and spoke, and overload the system much worse than a point to point system.

But a point to point system would require smaller load factors, and you would have independent regional carriers who are not under contract to major airlines.

Quote: pacomartin

The cities are having to invest billions into an inherently inefficient transport system so that the airlines can maximize profits. The system encourages the airlines to overload the system much worse than a point to point system.

Creating traffic jams and getting them airborne.
Regional carriers would be wonderful but the majors want them to be captive entities wherein names, color schemes and everything else is controlled by the major airline but when an accident occurs the major airline can trot out this separate entity and say go sue the ex-fry chef.

Paco, you may want to see how Toluca does against Mex City's Juarez airport.

Take me. For a day trip, on business, I'd much rather fly out of Toluca. Parking's cheap and I can get there in under 30 minutes from my house. But on a longer trip it's cheaper to choose early or late flights and pay the cab to Juarez. Say the latter option costs around 450 pesos, while either parking for a week at Toluca or taking a cab to and from there would run around 1,000 pesos or more.

Quote: Nareed

Paco, you may want to see how Toluca does against Mex City's Juarez airport.

I know they were thinking about moving Mexico City airport to a more remote location where they could make it much bigger. Toluca developed it's flights when they cancelled that plan. But Mexico city's airport is still 5-6 times as big as Toluca. I think the future is still bright for Toluca, as it is easier for many businessmen to get to Toluca.

Mexico's air traffic is different than the USA. About half of it goes international (mostly USA). Mexico city and Cancun carry half the country's air passengers. It takes 16 airports in the USA to get up to half the air traffic.
ATL Atlanta
ORD Chicago
LAX Los Angeles
DFW Fort Worth
DEN Denver
JFK New York
IAH Houston
SFO San Francisco
LAS Las Vegas
PHX Phoenix
CLT Charlotte
MIA Miami
MCO Orlando
EWR Newark
DTW Detroit
MSP Minneapolis

Quote: pacomartin

I know they were thinking about moving Mexico City airport to a more remote location where they could make it much bigger.

Not quite.

The federal governmetn wanted to move the airport to Texcoco nearby in Mexico State, but that would eman shutting down the current airpot. the Mex City governmetn favored building a complementary airport in Hidalgo State, rather far away, and keeping the current one open. In the end the added a second terminal building, which is very nice (ask the Wizard), but that means there are still only two parallel runways.

In the meantime a bunch of upstart, low-cost airlines started operating out of Toluca airport. Of these only Interjet and Voalris remain, and they're operating more out of Mex City's Juarez now.

Quote:

Toluca developed it's flights when they cancelled that plan. But Mexico city's airport is still 5-6 times as big as Toluca. I think the future is still bright for Toluca, as it is easier for many businessmen to get to Toluca.

At least that much bigger, plus Toluca only has one runway.

My guess is thigns will get worse for Toluca before they get better. Once Juarez goes back to being congested, whetehr or not mexicana returns, Toluca will again be more appealing to buisness travelers. if only they could get cheaper transportation, they'd find a whole new market. As it is, cabs are way too expensive and shuttles too limited.

Quote: Nareed

At least that much bigger, plus Toluca only has one runway.

My guess is thigns will get worse for Toluca before they get better.

From the sct.gob.mx website I see that Toluca has lost 30% of it's passengers in the last year, so it will get a lot worse.

There is a myth that an airport can't handle very many passengers with only one runway. Gatwick Airport near London has a single runway and had 31,375,290 passengers in 2010 (far more than Mexico City). Gatwick has the world's busiest single-use runway averaging 52 aircraft movements an hour.

While it is true that Gatwick does have some very large wide-body aircraft you can still land a lot of people in a single runway. Consider
( 52 movements per hour) *( 17 hours per day) *(100 people per aircraft) *(365 days per year) = 32,266,000 passengers per year.

While the equipment to do that many landings is expensive, the potential is still significantly higher than Toluca's 2,164,514 passengers last year. Plus most narrowbody jets carry well over 100 people even with 15% empty seats.

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This argument was featured very prominently in the discussion of San Diego Airport (also a single runway airport). San Diego airport handles roughly 17 million passengers per year on a single runway, and they widely published the statement that when they reached 23 million passengers per year, they would experience severe delays, dangerous situations, and the airlines would have to begin huge fare increases to reduce demand. The end result would be economic losses for the county adding up to tens of billions of dollars per year.

I felt that the Airport authority in San Diego was greatly exaggerating the consequences of not having a second runway . Gatwick was up to 31 million and making plans to reach 40 million without adding another runway. Although they had some advantages over San Diego, they were not so overwhelming that it was impossible to imagine the San Diego airport being sufficient for decades.

Las Vegas has two runways, but they cross each other and cannot be used at the same time.

Quote: pacomartin

There is a myth that an airport can't handle very many passengers with only one runway.

It's not a matter of volume, but traffic. Multiple runways allow you to land or launch two planes at once, or with less separation. So a two-runway airport is likely to see less delays and congestion, all other things being equal, than a one-runway place. Beides, you're less likely to have big problems, congestion-wise, due to bad wind conditions.

Quote:

Las Vegas has two runways, but they cross each other and cannot be used at the same time.

Four :)