We did the PHL-centric story we mentioned last night. Find it here. This is from yesterday: Our apologies to those who come here first for airline news. We have been hung up today trying to do our own PHL-centric take on what a Delta-Northwest merger means. In the meantime, here's the big industry picture in an AP story,
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Uptdated today: Implications of a Delta-Northwest merger
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Tom Belden, a former Inquirer business writer, has written about Philadelphia International Airport, airlines, the travel industry, the conventions and meetings business for 25 years. He has traveled to all 50 states and extensively in Europe and Mexico.
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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on April 15, 2008 5:07 PM.
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Comments (1)
DL+NW kills the Cincinnati hub in less than six months. The place is like a morgue most hours of the day. Very disorganized. Last time I flew through CVG, the alarms went off, we should have evacuated the DL mainline concourse, but everyone just wandered around looking for direction. And the bus connection to the commuter gates just doesn't work when the mainline concourses have a train. After the DL hub dies, maybe CVG can shut down the "other airlines" Terminal B and the US-only Terminal C. And these airlines' customers can have food and restrooms in the secure gate areas.
The other casualty is the DC-9. NW gambled that they could retrofit 40-year old aircraft and stay profitable. At one time, they operated almost 200 old-timer DC-9s. While these aircraft have the good 70-100 seat capacities that lots of hub-and-spoke operators are looking for right now, the fuel costs of this way-too-old technology just make it uneconomical, especially compared to operators using the much more fuel efficients 717 (AirTran, Hawai'ian), A318 (Frontier), E19x (US, UA, others), and CRJ-900 (several). Lots of DC-9s headed to the desert.
With the loss of their aircraft, NW pilots are obviously concerned, maybe scared. People with obsolete skill sets are not happy.
DL, of course, has that oversized fleet of CRJ-200s that aren't making money either. They have to give up a lot of marginal routes, like Wilmington-Atlanta and New Haven-Cincinnati, both of which recently shut down. NW has some SAAB 340s that can fly some of the smaller routes at better profit margins and on more congested runways, like at Hartsfield-Jackson. These planes, many of which are currently based in MEM, could be moving around the system soon.
While MEM is horrible for local-origin traffic, this hub has one major advantage over any other hub in the country - 24 hour airport infrastructure from the other hub- FedEx. That keeps landing costs low, because the fixed costs are spread over far more flights than the passenger hub could possibly generate. This hub may not be toast after all.
One more thing to watch for. The Japanese government will have influence over this merger. NW operates a small Tokyo hub. DL will need to win over the Japanese government.
Posted by rich | April 16, 2008 6:10 AM
Posted on April 16, 2008 06:10