Fort Worth-based American Airlines is moving much of its Asian traffic from the Southern California international flying hub to DFW, a move that could open more opportunities for North Texas to access business and leisure destinations but disrupt how much of the country gets across the Pacific.East Coast Elites will have to stop in the middle of Flyover Country to change planes.
American is making the move after decades of considering LAX its trans-Pacific hub to fly to destinations such as Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul and even Auckland, New Zealand. But the landscape is changing with the
When we came back from Down Under over a year ago, we came back through San Francisco, but not on American.
"Dallas certainly doesn’t have the best geography for an Asian hub," said American’s vice president of network and schedule planning. "But it does have some advantages in connecting people in the Southeast [United States] to Asia."
You'll still have to go through Atlanta, I presume.
American made the decision in June when it was trying to piece back together an international schedule that had been decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which first hit Asia and quickly affected travel to Asia from the U.S.
Buried on page 14A of Sunday's paper was the news of a North Texas guy who saw his Doctor January 27 with a really bad case of the flu, but tested positive for COVID antibodies in April.
It was overshadowed at the time by the massive restructuring airlines were undertaking to survive the global health pandemic, including efforts to trim payrolls and convince passengers it’s safe to fly. While it could take years for international air traffic to recover to previous levels, American is starting to show why making DFW its trans-Pacific hub makes sense.
American’s emphasis on its DFW hub started even before the pandemic. Last year, it fulfilled a plan to put 900 flights a day out of DFW, its fortress hub that can connect to nearly any other location it serves in the country.
That makes DFW an attractive launching point for Asia because it would be a single stop for most of American’s U.S. travelers, said a Dallas-based aviation consultant with Ailevon Pacific.
DFW has room to grow, too. The airport property is roughly the size of the island of Manhattan. There are plans for a new $3 billion terminal F at DFW that would give 24 more gates, mostly to American Airlines. While the pandemic put those plans on hold, airport officials expect the project to only be pushed back, not scrapped.
Well, New York and California probably don't want more flights anyway, for Gaia's sake. Oh, wait...
LAX has other drawbacks. Passengers with connecting flights in different terminals often have to go outside and re-enter security screening lines. The airport is also nearly at capacity, making it hard to expand.
Those long-haul flights can be very profitable for airlines, at least under the right circumstances. According to aviation data firm OAG, the three most profitable flights out of DFW Airport are a Sydney flight operated by Qantas and American’s Tokyo-Narita and London Heathrow flights. The DFW-Narita route brings in nearly $200,000 per flight. The DFW-LAX flight, the most frequent route from DFW, only brings in about $32,000 per flight.I figure that's pre-pandemic, too.
"LAX is becoming very expensive for airlines to operate from and it’s extremely competitive, and that tends to lower airfares," said a travel consultant based in San Francisco. "It’s a matter of American focusing on where it can have the best return on a very expensive asset."