txaggie

 If we have more realistic demand, ticket pricing

This. 

Demand is too much in and between many markets.

One thing being the game's database seemingly not differentiating between O&D and connecting passengers at many airports- which is artificially adding demand that's not there in real life.

For example, I'm looking at an airline right now that operates a massive trans-continental operation out of Columbus, Ohio. While it is perhaps plausible an airline could develop a hub at CMH and support some level of international traffic- it seems unlikely that there are 51 passengers a day looking for a flight between Columbus and Kolkata, India. And with 44 other hubs in a highly saturated USA, it seems unlikely this particular airline should be finding enough connecting passengers to have any sort of hub operation from Columbus, Ohio.

Perhaps the more egregious hub is the one at Grand Rapids- there's actually 2 more airlines running fairly substantial but non hub operations out of GRR, too. 2 flights a week to Tunis, Tunisia? Really? 5 combined flights a week to Moscow's 3 airports? Seriously?

Demand seems to be scaled wrong, allowing airlines to become too large in too many markets. 

Tickets prices are arguably too high at first, allowing for airlines to really blow the doors to expansion open very, very quickly.

What PHX has on it's side is that you can only get so big over at LAX. As for caring less, I meant the functionality of the hub itself as that's what I thought he commented on. The problem with you saying that the Northeast is O & D based, is that a good 30% of CLT's passengers come from the Northeast. Cut them out (because of DCA/PHL/JFK/even ORD to an extent) and you have very little people from the Northeast flying in therefore affecting the loads on connecting flights. The same could be said with the west. In fact, out of the Top 10 busiest routes out of CLT, 4 of them are from the Northeast (replaceable) and 3 of them are current AA or US hubs. That leaves Atlanta, Houston (DFW can do that job 10x better), and Orlando (MIA works just fine.)

US Airways has made the CLT-DCA-PHL dynamic work, so I think the question is how the two bookends at JFK and MIA effect the network.

American's operation at JFK is O&D based- sorry if I insinuated the northeast in its entirety is. AA at JFK is international traffic and a handful of primarily domestic trunk routes. I'm sure they may attempt to expand some, but I think it'd be focused on their O&D traffic- it'd be hella expensive and difficult, and probably impossible, to do anything massive. Delta is trying, but they're still somewhat limited and still heavy on the O&D traffic.

I think it would probably make more sense to keep the connections running through PHL and CLT. Its cheaper, its easier, they're more established. CLT in particular is the most established/the largest, the easiest to expand, etc... I'd find it strange if you break that apart at PHL and CLT to try to build the same thing in the arguably less favorable situation at JFK.

You break up CLT, and I'm sure Delta is seeing dollar signs, hearing cha-chings, and probably sniffing blood. They may try to further degrade CLT via pumping up ATL to an even larger operation than it currently is.

As for MIA, I can understand some of it- but its still kind of the same thing. Why pull back something that is working at CLT to move down to MIA and be in a less favorable location for many markets. I can definitely see MIA pulling some of CLT's Carribean and Latin American traffic and that leading to some further domestic cuts at CLT...but to lose half of their flights? Its just not what I think will happen, but I guess we'll see.

AA could care less about how bad MIA is for connections... it is more logical for Latin America (one of CLT's main missions.) Therefore, it will be used more.

*Could *not* care less, but that's not going to be their (its actually going to be a lot of US AIrways management) attitude. You don't simply not care about connecting the southeast United States and the northeast United States- AA didn't fight to make Raleigh/Durham work because they didn't care.

p.s. Regarding all of their hubs, there are some in the industry that believe AA-US are taking this merger a little different than the past two and will look to keep their system pretty much intact.

It could be PHX that needs to worry the most considering its location between DFW and LAX although perhaps that will signify a retreat east and that may not be something they want to do.