gthog61, on Sep 30 2007, 06:27 PM, said:
The problem is that while the 30+% of people who only transfer and aren't going to ATL sounds like a lot, I'll bet they are spread over all the flights, not equally probably but where probably 90% of the flights thru Atlanta have at least 20% of the pax with ATL as a final destination. I was thinking maybe you could have a mini-hub at one of the outlying airports served by RJs to connect the smaller cities in the SE to each other but if you bleed off some pax from the ATL flights then you'd be hitting the airlines hard as they need the flights to be mostly full to make money. The airlines could respond with smaller planes but then you'd just have about the same number of departures, just with smaller on average aircraft, so you wouldn't ease up on the capacity any. Even if you build an airport north of the city it would still be inconvenient for someone passing through to connect via the two airports so it would need to generally service local traffic only. That would also bleed off pax from the planes passing through Hartsfield. At any rate it would be a very complex problem to coordinate the two airports, building one up from scratch, and also take a large amount of money and I could see why the Delta Prez wouldn't be terribly gung-ho about it. PLaces like LA/Chicago/NY are a lot bigger final destination markets amd like someone else said places like Houston and Dallas already had the second airports from having moved out of them earlier.
I think the smaller city airports ringing ATL can grow but it is going to have to be from people wanting to go there as an end destination, not from transfers through them.
You got the ratio reversed; only 30-40% of enplanements at ATL are origin and destination traffic. The O&D traffic for Atlanta should grow (in absolute numbers and probably percentage) as the metro continues to grow (which is part of why they're talking about a new airport now).
Neither Delta nor AirTran want another airport, because serving both would be very inefficient/costly for them and would represent an opening (threat) for new carriers to enter or existing carriers expand service to the market. A new commercial airport (or expanded other airport) would likely only support domestic service (lower build costs) making it more attractive to a low-cost carrier than a legacy carrier. But if a second airport was on placed the north side, positioned to draw off some of the more affluent and frequent travelers, DL could hardly afford to ignore it. AirTran might be faced with a decision to move their entire ATL hub operation to a new airport (rather than operate from both) in order to fend off new low-cost carriers that might want to enter the market at a new facility (Southwest? the return of JetBlue?).
Point-to-point traffic outside the major cities in the southern US may change dramatically in the next few years as the new (and existing) air taxi services bring their new micro-jets online. Companies such as
DayJet and
Imagine Air will offer seat-priced, on-demand flights from the smaller general aviation airports (PDK, McCullom, Briscoe, Charlie Brown) using fuel-efficient
very light jets that could siphon a lot of regional business traffic from commercial carriers. The pricing will supposedly be a small premium on a full-fare coach ticket on a commercial carrier. Already, just using a turboprop,
Wings Air has been offering a gameday shuttle for only $89 from PDK to Athens Ben Epps. They also just announced their intent to provide shuttle service from Briscoe to ATL including TSA security clearance at Briscoe.
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