Point is I don’t think they do much East Coast business right now, I’m pretty sure all of their hubs are on the West Coast. So if they’re looking to establish a hub out this way, RDU is probably the largest airport not being used as a hub by some airline (not counting it being a Delta focus city)
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They are (and you can go to Wikipedia for a full list of their hubs and destinations). But since they bought Houston-based Virgin America and still didn’t make that a new hub of theirs, I’m having a hard time imagining they’d make an East Coast hub in the first place.
Besides, I don’t think it’s that bad of a problem that RDU isn’t used as a hub airport. We still have plenty of direct flights and a large travel market, so that negates many of the reasons why it’s cheaper to fly out of hub airports. So if RDU becomes an airline hub, it could make it easier for that airline to dominate the market, cut off flight options, and artificially inflate prices (which we know to happen in other hub airports). Personally, I am totally fine with having more options and having airlines compete over us, rather than having companies stack the deck in their favor.
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My only complaint about RDU not being a hub, and it’s a very small one, is that it makes it more difficult to accumulate points for one specific airline when you have so many airlines serving different destinations. Probably comes out in the wash though for reasons you mentioned.
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Blockquote The new, longer runway would allow for heavier planes with more passengers and cargo, sure,
I remember that one justification for designing a longer runway was to eventually attract a nonstop flight to Asia, more specifically China. **
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Yeah, this was their plan because I remember seeing it in RDU’s 2040 commercial.
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This new run way will not be long enough for Asian flights to land/take off.
It’s my understanding that RDU has plans to extend the new runway by another 1000ft if demand returns. The talk of direct RDU to China flights got me excited, but now that world has changed so much in past few years no so much. Just for ref according to Goggley it’s 7,594 air miles from RDU to PVG (Shanghai) and 19+ hours. A fully loaded out 787-9 has a range of 7,635 and takeoff runway of 9,300 ft. So cross fingers hope there are no delays or strong headwind or may end up in Tokyo. I assume the 9,300 is a minimum but they would love to have the extra 1600ft at RDU (current plan +1000ft future)
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Hopefully they will extend it as far as they can. They were originally planning on extending it 1,500 feet to bring the total length to 11,500 feet which would make it the longest runway in NC and would allow for direct flights to Asia. I skimmed over the RDU 2040 plan and they had originally studied a direct flight to Beijing however that was pre-pandemic. The distance from RDU to Beijing is right around 6,000 nautical miles and according to the study RDU would need a runway of at least 11,000 feet in order to accommodate it. Unfortunately plans were scaled back to only extend the runway around 600 feet putting our runway at less than 11,000 and short of a direct flight to Asia. I could be wrong though I’m not an engineer
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Welcome to the community! Right, like we discussed earlier, the approved new runway length will be slightly shorter. If RDU wants to extend it further after they build it, they’d have to go up to the FAA to request it again.
So @scotchman, 10,639ft is the longest we’re going to get for the time being. Remember that RDU requested just 10,000ft, so the extra 639ft is an unexpected upgrade that we didn’t initially ask for. The airport’s struggling to get back to its pre-pandemic passenger levels for business travel, so it’ll be hard to justify huge splurges in capital infrastructure until they get back there.
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Montreal, London, and Paris direct flights all coming back soon.
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Having had to go through a four-flight odyssey to get back from a regional European city on Monday, this is music to my ears.
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It would be hard for most airlines to justify making us a hub as we are neither a massive city nor do we fill a void in their geographic strategy. American has Charlotte. United has Dulles. Southwest doesn’t actually do hub and spoke model.
Delta could definitely “upgrade” us from Focus City to Hub, which is not unheard of, but again…Atlanta is very close. So it won’t happen until business travel becomes more frequent here again. Meaning, those 13 daily flights each way between RDU-ATL are packed again.
We had a shot with JetBlue increasing their presence but the timing wasn’t ideal and it seems they are going to draw back a bit.
Alaska would be an interesting one if they wanted to increase their east coast network while also giving the finger to Delta for doing what they did in Seattle. But it wouldn’t come without significant investment.
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That’s a shame to hear, they’ve consistently been the best airline I’ve had experience with in all my flying.
The TBJ published an overview on how redevelopment at RDU is going, as well as their latest thoughts on how to bring back international flights (and how business flights have been harder to bring back than leisure-focused ones, putting RDU at a disadvantage over, for example, Miami and Cancun).
It’s basically a longer, more detailed and well-sourced version of what we talked about here, where RDU can still benefit plenty from getting a new runway that’s just 600-ish feet longer. Flights to China are still on the back burner, but they’re clearly thinking about it.
About half of RDU’s pre-pandemic users were apparently business travelers. While business flyers have been returning in the past few months, they still haven’t reached that share just yet.
But remember how, pre-pandemic, RDU struggled with overflowing security lines and flight delays happening because there weren’t enough gates for certain flights? When business travelers are back, that could get even worse than it was in the before times -especially due to the labor (wage) shortage these days.
The obvious solution, then, is more queuing space and more gates. Except Terminal 2 physically cannot expand until the new runway is built and the current one’s decommissioned:
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Moving Sprit to Term 1 should help a tiny bit. Clearly not a fix, but perhaps a tad bit of relief.
Obviously think it’s a little suspicious that Alaska Airlines of all would be included. They’ve even mentioned RDU out of the blue as a place very significant in their network, while RDU was not in the topic of discussion. Obviously it doesn’t make sense for them to have a hub here, considering they are so west-coast based, but they also can’t provide customers with flights to the Caribbean due to the aircraft range. RDU is accessible from every airport in the continental USA on a 737, and many airports in northern parts of South America, while also having the possibility of Europe if ever desired. I wouldn’t say this is ever out of the possibility but it’s unlikely.
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No its actually good there interested and they should build a hub specifically in terminal 1 since terminal 2 was a hub for American Airlines or in was in the area where terminal 2 was. The convention center hotel and office towers the city go Raleigh is trying to develop I think the reason why there having a hard time finding developer besides the inflation and COVID and inability in confidence in the market and building such a transformative project is because we don’t have a hub. So then our area would be viable where something like that is possible because with a hub it would be possible too build a hotel with that many rooms because with the hub that can tell we can host large events.
I don’t think terminal 1 is the best option for expansion. It’s a great solution in the short-term but the terminal is smaller and cannot handle connecting passengers. What I’d rather see is a terminal 3 with an airside underground connection to terminal 2 or a terminal 2 satellite terminal. These were some of the Vision 2040 alternatives:
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Hmm interesting terminal 3 probably is necessary but I’ve always seen it been on the far west die of the airport across the runway. Hmm I have to read the 2040 plan.
RDU to London “The only long-haul international route in the American Airlines system that leaves out of a non-hub airport”
Interesting if true.
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