USA320Pilot said:
Last Thursday at the ALPA MEC meeting US Airways' executive vice president of marketing and planning Ben Baldanza told meeting attendees that in November PIT will have less than 100 mainline flights per day. These flights will still have the hub and spoke feel and not one of a focus city.
In the spring, provided US Airways is still operating, the company will further reduce service to "focus city" size. The exact schedule and destinations are still under review, but separately I have heard the operation will have about 60 flights. Its unclear how many of those flights will be mainline and/or MDA.
Regards,
USA320Pilot
I won't comment on whether or not this poster's words reflect opinion or reality since it doesn't seem to add to the discussion, but...
PIT is down to 107 daily mainline departures at present, so a reduction to "under 100" would only be a draw-down of about 10% for the fall (assuming "under 100" is over 90). While significant (especially to the affected employees!), it's certainly no larger than other cutbacks which received far less fanfare. And to put things into persepective, the schedule cuts announced in August 2002 were far more significant at PIT, with 44 of 205 mainline departures being axed at that time.
Cutting the US Airways operation at PIT to 60 daily departures next spring says to me that the company has little intention of restructuring fares in the market. Why? Albuquerque's metro population is only 30% the size of PIT's, and yet WN (operating a low-fare point-to-point station at ABQ with non-stop service to 21 cities) manages 63 daily departures. Nashville is a bit over half as large as Pittsburgh and WN has 86 daily departures to 28 cities. With low fares as the stimulus, I believe that PIT O&D traffic could be easily doubled -- and that would justify a "focus city" operation comparable to or larger than the current mainline hub. And supposedly US will have a cost structure which will allow them to become a low-cost/fare carrier.
If PIT fares aren't restructured, service reductions coupled with the existing high fares
will lead to low-cost carrier expansion into the market; probably AirTran, jetBlue, or Southwest. AirTran tried it before and failed, but US was stronger and they were weaker at the time. JetBlue has lots of Embraer 190's coming, starting next year, and they will need a place to fly them. And interestingly enough, Southwest has predicted that they will add only one new city in 2005, even though they have over 30 new 737's entering the fleet that year (with the last 5 737-200's retired early in 2005). That says to me that their new city will be relatively large, and PIT would be a perfect candidate if fares remain high. Does anyone care to take a guess on the size of the traffic increase if PIT-PHL walk-up fares drop to $49 each way?
Southwest management has said that they wouldn't have gone into PHL if the fares there were lower. Their business model relies on stimulating additional traffic by offering more reasonable fares. Reducing service at PIT and keeping fares high will inevitably lead to more significant low-cost carrier entry (this is my prediction), and it will probably end up being like BWI all over again, except it will take US Airways fewer than eight years to wave the white flag in PIT.
