Morningstar Reviews AMR

[jimntx]

Um, AA has been the king of adding overcapacity and filling "niches that don't exist " for years:

50 seat all first class F100's out of Love to LAX, LGA, ORD
Love Field flight coming to Chicago
Why is AA flying LGA to MSP
Houston Hobby to LGA

Good grief, man. Don't you know that there are some people who rather slit their wrists than change planes in DFW or ORD?

Granted the 50-seater F-100s were at Love simply to compete with Legend, and the plan evidently worked. Or, at least our management likes to think it worked. As Eolesen pointed out. Legend, et al, is an unsustainable business model. They would not have lasted regardless of whether or not AA put in the F100s.

The other routes exist because there is a market for them. We have other routes that were put into Love and Hobby that have been eliminated because they didn't pay. We used to have a mainline flight on a S80 from HOU to AUS. It just never caught on; so, it was stopped.

 

[eolesen]

There's a bit of a backstory on AUS-HOU-LGA... For all intents and purposes, it was an AUS-LGA flight that did a technicality stop in HOU.

AA wanted to serve AUS-LGA and AUS-DCA, but couldn't because AUS was just outside their respective perimeters. They probably still have one-stops routed via DFW today, but routing thru HOU allowed for a 20 minute turn, saving about 30-60 minutes off the one-stops via DFW.

It's still the closest thing to a railroad flag stop I've ever seen in an AA schedule (Shannon stopovers in Ireland are another example, but AA never had to do them). Had AA been able to overfly HOU some days without getting in trouble with the respective port authorities, they would have gladly done so in both directions...