gregl wrote: ↑Sep 16, 2017
symphonicpoet wrote: ↑Sep 15, 2017
Before we go any further in this discussion, I'd like to suggest that everyone look at Southwest's other major mid-continent stations on a map. Dallas Love, Chicago Midway, and Houston Hobby. Go. I'll wait. Take a look. Just a glance, really. It won't take long. All three have something fairly simple and obvious in common. Something that dramatically does not pertain at their number five mid-continent station. (And I think the largest one presently without benefit of an operating base.)
If you are insinuating that those are important cities for Southwest because they've redone their terminals in the past 20 years, I'll rebut that in 2 ways:
1) Southwest has a new terminal in St Louis within the last 20 years.
2) Those aren't important cities because of new terminals, but because of the size of the cities. Each is also a hub for a least one of the 3 largest airlines in the country.
I'm not trying to insinuate anything about why they are important. That seems obvious enough. Nor do I particularly care when they were updated. You can't really see that from an aerial photo. I'm interested in what they have in common: they're all Southwest hubs and they're all teeny weeny little things surrounded by expensive land with lots of people on it. Which is quite specifically why Southwest is in them and not DFW or ORD. What I'm attempting to insinuate is that much more growth at these three airports might be . . . cost prohibitive. Purely speculation on my part. I've never flown through any of them. But they all look to be islands in a sea of stuff I wouldn't want to have to buy. And there's not very much green inside the perimeter fences. They're pretty compact. They're all great little airports for O&D, since they're smack in the middle of town. But I'm not sure how you could hope to get another dozen gates in any of them. Even six might be hard. And each of them is functionally a two parallel runway airport for the purposes of jet airlines. Things will start getting tight fast after about twenty million people. And third parallel runways are, as we know only too well, expensive. And while the cities are hubs for other airlines, the airports are certainly not. I don't see Southwest giving up those airports, but I also don't see them trying to move into the majors. They could, I suppose, but they've resisted it so far, even when incentives were put in play.
And if, at some point, it becomes necessary to connect from DL to WN then at that point we can find a way to connect A to C via a transformed (and by then likely open) B. It will be interesting to see how all of this unfolds.
This is never going to be a major concern. Passengers just don't have the need to connect between major airlines in the US, with very limited exceptions.
This was intended to be a funny, thus the joke about B. We're on the same team here. Before I saw building plans I thought it would be nice, but you'd have to move a lot of offices to make it work. And if I were airport director I darn well would not want to give up my airfield view just so four people could connect from Delta to Webber without going back through security. It's not worth that. The only way I see something like this happening is if we're serving thirty or forty million passengers every year. And even then, the utility would be . . . marginal. Near zero. As you say, passengers don't connect across universes. I've done it once. It was an oddity. (American to KAL. So even that wasn't between major domestic airlines. Just one team to another. And this was in Chicago, so I was going Tnot5 to T5 no matter what I did. Even if I'd stayed same team.)
Anyway . . .
We're largely saying the same things, actually, but maybe putting the emphasis on different points. I was trying to be a little light and humorous, so maybe I wasn't completely clear. I fully agree with you that the legacy carriers aren't coming back and that no new airline is going to move in and save us. (Nor do I think we need saving, but that's another matter.) There's no reason to connect A to the rest of the airport. (I think it'd be fun, but I wouldn't pay the price. There's no use in it. The A concourse is functionally T3. And that's fine.) I fully agree with you that Dallas, Houston, and Chicago are extremely important markets and by no means are we going to overtake any of themin any foreseeable future. I think we can probably agree on literally all of that.
But there's a difference between Houston and Houston-Hobby or Dallas and Dallas-Love. And lord knows there's a very very big difference between Chicago and Midway. Apart from Southwest MDW might well be Chicago Executive by now. Or possibly even Meigs Field. (Though that last seems a bit unlikely.) And it's pretty clear Love would have been closed if Southwest hadn't fought tooth and nail to keep it open.
What I want to say that the three airports above have in common is that they're all really quite small and very crowded and probably at about their maximum feasible capacity without enormous investment. The reason I selected the three of them and not some of WN's other major stations is specifically because they're the mid-continent hubs Southwest doesn't officially admit it has. There's no disputing that they're important cities, but they're also where the bulk of Southwest's connections can be found. And while it's useful for that to occur in a place with healthy O&D I see no reason it's absolutely necessary that it be the single largest market you serve. (It actually seems like it usually isn't the biggest market. Just a healthy one in the right spot.) The most important point, from that standpoint, should be whether it can be done efficiently at that station in terms of time, schedule, and cost.
Southwest has already been growing connections here rather more than O&D. Quite a bit more, if jshank's analysis is correct. (And it certainly seems about dead on.) So the argument can be made that St. Louis has, in fact, already been rehubbed, albeit in a small way at the moment. So my suggestion to look at those three fields really hinges on two questions. We know that Southwest is growing their route network. (By all appearances fairly aggressively in fact.) We know that they use connections. (It would be rather silly not to, since they allow Southwest to make their route structure more flexible. Direct flights are preferred, but not always practical or even possible.) So the questions are these: How will they use connecting traffic moving forward, and where will they put it?
I certainly don't believe they would in any way move out of MDW, DAL, or HOU. (Or any of their other major stations, for that matter.) All of these are vital nodes in their network. But I can easily believe they will attempt to use those nodes as efficiently as possible to serve their O&D customers there. They're the bread and butter, right? You want to keep them happy. I'm making the argument not that these places are unimportant, but that they are very important but just about full. Space might be at a premium and you need lots of direct flights from those bases. So how does Southwest grow? Where do they put that connecting traffic?
Lambert seems an obvious and very sound solution. In fact, it seems equally obvious that they are already doing it. So the only real question is how much it will continue. From the plans and rumors that keep bubbling up I'm willing to guess this is only the beginning.
But even considering that, I think it will be 2025 at least before any particularly large investment in new infrastructure might possibly be required. And that's a bit of a longshot. What's there now is more than adequate for our immediate needs, so we should be focused on maintaining what we have, preserving it against the future, and finding ways to make it as efficient, pleasant, and affordable as possible. And like you, I think, I don't believe new concourses, major demolition, sub-sub basements, and the like would serve anything right now. There might, eventually, be a case for a gate swap. But this is all I would guess at in the near to mid term. And even that's something of a maybe. Apart from that I expect nothing more than a slow but steady flow of reopening and updating existing infrastructure. I honestly believe we have a quite decent airport for our needs.
