CVG - How The Mighty Have Fallen
It's been some time since I've flown into Cincinatti-Northern Kentucky Airport from home. Most of the MSY-CVG flights these days are on "regional jets," those smaller, ~50-seat planes that Patrick Smith of Salon's "Ask The Pilot" decries as the main reason airport delays are what they are. (Capt. Smith argues that airlines want to schedule more flights, so they use the smaller jets rather than packing 300+ people on one wide-body plane.) I'm usually not a big fan of the regional jets, because my fat butt is rarely comfortable in a coach seat on a B737, much less an even smaller CRJ-100.
Still, today was an exception, because Tropical Storm Fay is playing havoc with weather patterns across the Olde South. My comfy first class seat on the 5:30pm nonstop from MSY to New York's LaGuardia airport looked like a Really Bad Idea when I went to bed last night, so I dragged Mrs. YatPundit out of bed at 5am to drive me to Armstrong. Delta re-booked me on a morning run to LGA, connecting through Cincinatti.
I used to go through CVG a lot, back when I was teaching for Digital/Compaq. The Digital mothership facility for Tru64 UNIX was up in Nashua, NH. Not wanting to fight Boston's Logan International, I'd fly into Manchester, NH (MHT). Flying a big jet from MSY-CVG and connecting to a regional jet to MHT, then the reverse was a regular thing for me, right up to 9/11. In fact, I took the MHT-CVG/CVG-MSY route home on 15-Sep-2001.
Back at that time, CVG was a Serious Hub Airport. You could walk along the "A" or "B" concourses and see the Big Jets, the 767s and 777s, heading to California, Japan, and Europe. Delta's bread-and-butter jets, B757s, 737s and MD88s were in-and-out as fast as the ground crews could turn them around. Little Feat even wrote about CVG in their tune "Oh, Atlanta."
Not only did the big jets fly in and out of CVG, but the airport was also the home port of ComAir, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines. ComAir operated the smaller jets and prop planes that would feed fliers from the hub airport to the single-runway, small-town airports of the south and midwest. Want to go to Grand Rapids, MI? Fly to CVG and take a "puddle jumper" plane to your destination.
Sad to say, the Hard Times of George W. Bush have hit CVG. In its heyday, you'd transfer by bus from the big jet you arrived in on "A" or "B" over to the "regional" concourse, "C." I was worried about time this morning, when the pilot of the Embraer 145 regional jet I took on the MSY-CVG leg of today's trip said we'd be 15 minutes late. Factoring in the bus ride from "C" back to "A" didn't leave me with a lot of time. Imagine my surprise when the flight attendant told me our arrival gate was A18.
A 50-seat jet landing at CVG with the Big Jets? Wow, that was a surprise.
Only that there were no big jets.
With the exception of two MD88s, all the jets parked at gates on "A" were regional in size. There are a number of possible explanations for this decline in the need for big planes at CVG:
1. 9/11 spooked a lot of Americans, and we don't fly as much now.
2. The general economic malaise of the last few years keeps people home.
3. Market forces in the airline industry have pushed the big jets aside.
4. $100+/bbl oil means obscenely high prices for jet fuel.
Take your pick, they're all solid reasons (and if you've got others to add, feel free to do so in comments).
It's interesting that three of these four can be attributed to the policies of the Cheney administration and their Republic enablers in Congress. Still, voters in all of the states where Delta hubs are located (GA, OH, UT), are going to vote for a continuation of those policies.
Go figure.
Still, today was an exception, because Tropical Storm Fay is playing havoc with weather patterns across the Olde South. My comfy first class seat on the 5:30pm nonstop from MSY to New York's LaGuardia airport looked like a Really Bad Idea when I went to bed last night, so I dragged Mrs. YatPundit out of bed at 5am to drive me to Armstrong. Delta re-booked me on a morning run to LGA, connecting through Cincinatti.
I used to go through CVG a lot, back when I was teaching for Digital/Compaq. The Digital mothership facility for Tru64 UNIX was up in Nashua, NH. Not wanting to fight Boston's Logan International, I'd fly into Manchester, NH (MHT). Flying a big jet from MSY-CVG and connecting to a regional jet to MHT, then the reverse was a regular thing for me, right up to 9/11. In fact, I took the MHT-CVG/CVG-MSY route home on 15-Sep-2001.
Back at that time, CVG was a Serious Hub Airport. You could walk along the "A" or "B" concourses and see the Big Jets, the 767s and 777s, heading to California, Japan, and Europe. Delta's bread-and-butter jets, B757s, 737s and MD88s were in-and-out as fast as the ground crews could turn them around. Little Feat even wrote about CVG in their tune "Oh, Atlanta."
Not only did the big jets fly in and out of CVG, but the airport was also the home port of ComAir, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines. ComAir operated the smaller jets and prop planes that would feed fliers from the hub airport to the single-runway, small-town airports of the south and midwest. Want to go to Grand Rapids, MI? Fly to CVG and take a "puddle jumper" plane to your destination.
Sad to say, the Hard Times of George W. Bush have hit CVG. In its heyday, you'd transfer by bus from the big jet you arrived in on "A" or "B" over to the "regional" concourse, "C." I was worried about time this morning, when the pilot of the Embraer 145 regional jet I took on the MSY-CVG leg of today's trip said we'd be 15 minutes late. Factoring in the bus ride from "C" back to "A" didn't leave me with a lot of time. Imagine my surprise when the flight attendant told me our arrival gate was A18.
A 50-seat jet landing at CVG with the Big Jets? Wow, that was a surprise.
Only that there were no big jets.
With the exception of two MD88s, all the jets parked at gates on "A" were regional in size. There are a number of possible explanations for this decline in the need for big planes at CVG:
1. 9/11 spooked a lot of Americans, and we don't fly as much now.
2. The general economic malaise of the last few years keeps people home.
3. Market forces in the airline industry have pushed the big jets aside.
4. $100+/bbl oil means obscenely high prices for jet fuel.
Take your pick, they're all solid reasons (and if you've got others to add, feel free to do so in comments).
It's interesting that three of these four can be attributed to the policies of the Cheney administration and their Republic enablers in Congress. Still, voters in all of the states where Delta hubs are located (GA, OH, UT), are going to vote for a continuation of those policies.
Go figure.
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