Quote:
Originally Posted by Itsajob
Everyone knows that Chicago politics is famous for its corruption. It’s the “Chicago way”. The problem with ORD is that you have two huge airlines who make it a major hub. There’s only so much pavement. Being that we are extremely limited on gate space, wouldn’t it alleviate some of the crowding if we ran fewer flights with bigger aircraft to move the people? This is an example of where 100 seat jets could potentially be a good thing. If not 100 seats planes, more of our current NB fleet types replacing regional flying. Kirby is hoping that we relax scope, but that isn’t going to happen. We’ll just sit in the penalty box and collect overs waiting on a gate. Relaxing scope in the past created this problem. As far as I’m concerned it ends now and we claw back what we gave away over the last 20+ years.
To be fair, Chicago doesn’t hold the exclusive rights to political or business corruption. Pretty much any city or town or podunk hamlet has its own version of the same.
And regarding the actual operation of ORD, I agree with the rest. We are gate constrained. Hardly any delays anymore due to traffic (wx of course is another issue) with the new runways in use. But fewer flights (by upgauging) also has potential negative follow on effects. Would the schedule be competitive with American or someone else? Do those “slots” get used by competitor(s)?
Above my pay grade and knowledge to figure out if 7x a day on a 175 is better or worse then 4x a day on a 319 from a revenue/profit. Better for us as pilots? Yes. But for the corporation? That’s what network planning/revenue management has to figure out.