I cannot see any reason for BA to take over LHR. It makes AA $90M a year, is their second most profitable flight to London per departure, and they have the American appeal… and have also served the route for 20 years
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TBJ posted an article about the announcement on Monday. They don’t know who it will be either, but are speculating on both Dublin and Amsterdam as possibilities.
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KLM did just update their schedule and bump 3 789 routes to 777 (including AUS). I suppose it’s possible
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How about a daily round trip to Nagoya (Toyota connection FTW)
Of course this 100% unrealistic, it is about as likely as Auckland or something but hey, a guy can dream can’t he
NGO currently has zero nonstop flights to the continental US, but they do have Honolulu and Guam, plus a rather off-the-wall nonstop to Helsinki. And of course pretty solid Asian connections…
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RDU is ranked #1 for medium sized commercial hubs for the quality of its commercial air service according to the Swelbar-Zhong Ranking of the Quality of Commercial Air Service at Airports Large and Small, a study that looks at 342 airports across the nation.
Edit: a couple of highlights from the article:
“Raleigh is blessed to have a good portfolio of network carriers and ULCCs (ultra low-cost carriers) and that’s contributed to the growth,” he said.
When it comes to international service at medium hub airports, Raleigh slides in at number two after Honolulu.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Raleigh-Durham is getting close to moving from the medium hub to the large hub category," Swelbar said.
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I think to be classified as a large hub airport it would need to have at least 18 million passengers and it currently stands at 14.5 million at the moment.
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I have read that to be considered a large hub, an airport needs to handle 1% or more of US passenger traffic, so I think it is a moving target.
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Are large hubs about max’d out? Realistically, how many more people can be squeezed through a place like JFK? Is there a point where increasing size just doesn’t make any sense?
If so, perhaps that is good news for places like RDU as airline’s are pushed to look elsewhere. Of course, demand trumps nearly everything.
I am still dubious about getting an Amsterdam flight, as awesome as that’d be. There was a major push to decreased flights. Maybe it was just the post pandemic difficulty in hiring staff, and international will take precedence over domestic at a hub like Schiphol.
Do we know the year-over-year growth numbers. I.e. 14.5 million this year what was it last year.
Came here to say the same thing about “hub” categories. Has nothing to do with whether an airline calls a specific airport a “hub” for them or not. It’s an FAA category of passenger levels relative to other airports’ passenger levels.
Large hub is 1%, medium hub is 0.25% to 1%, small hub is .05%-.025%, nonhub is .05% but more than 10,000 enplanements. That’s passengers boarded, starting at that airport.
The RDU stats of 14.5 million show enplanements + deplanements. They’re not always equal; passengers fly one way trips all the time, but they’re ROUGHLY 7 miilion and change for each. Definitely bounced back above 2019 pre-COVID numbers, but just barely.
Our international service additions, including whatever is announced Monday, all that flying to new countries from RDU, is BONKERS how much we’re growing in that regard. Well done.
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I feel like RDU is turning into a mini-version of Dulles or Boston-Logan airports that have lots of foreign carriers.
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Looks like copa is the winner, PTY (Panama City) 4x weekly starting June 21.
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Where did you see that?
I did not have Panama City on RDU bingo card.
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Had to look up what airline Copa is. And what PTY means. So, frequent direct flights to Panama City? Weird. I mean, I’m not opposed. Just don’t know how much sense this makes here. I guess we’ll see.
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Ishrion aviation on x
It does look like this is Copa’s hub, and you’ll be able to connect to CA and SA from there - a nice way to break up the flight to Buenos Aires or Rio, should you be going there.
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Panama City is actually really cool. My wife and I went over New Year’s a couple years back and it’s a great country. LOTS to see and do once you get outside the city (which is pretty neat in its own right).
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Panama City is a nice addition from Copa Airlines! Hopefully it does well…
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