Only 5 Cities Support More Than One Mega Airport

by Gary Leff

News notes from around the interweb:

  • New American Airlines safety video coming. From the Q3 State of the Airline employee written Q&A followup released Tuesday “We plan for regular updates of our safety video and are developing our next version now.” Several people seem to think it will be out March 1 to coincide with new uniforms.

  • Only 5 cities have two airports each handling 50 million airline seats or more per year

  • oneworld alliance is considering introducing alliance-wide upgrades where you’d use miles in one program to upgrade paid tickets on another carrier. If this happens – and introduction isn’t imminent – it will presumably be limited to the highest fare tickets.

  • United is integrating 3D views of their cabins with seat maps so customers can get a feel for the seats they might select. American isn’t doing that but since each airline copies the next – sort of – American plans to take existing 3D content and integrate that into seat maps. Yeah, that’s the same thing… Also from written Q&A followup:

    We’ve had 3D content on aa.com for quite some time, including offering virtual tours of our Premium Economy product for customers. We will be integrating this content into the seat maps and booking options on aa.com and the app. We also have several fleet types for customers to explore all cabins virtually at https://exploreamerican.com/virtual-tour/tour.htm

  • Why you can’t open an aircraft door midflight (HT: Tommy L)

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. The 3d view thing (Matterport) is excellent and should be legally required for all airlines and apartments for rent.

  2. RE: 3D views. I’m guessing they wont do a 3D view for each individual plane, which is unfortunate, because mostly what I would use it for is to check whether bulkhead seats have cutouts for your feet or if the bulkhead goes all the way to the floor.

    I’ve been on multiple 757-300s that are ostensibly the same configuration but differ in regards to bulkhead “type”.

  3. The Los Angeles area likely could support two 50m+ passenger airports, but NIMBYs will never allow it, so we get a bunch of tiny decentralized airports to support LAX instead. Boardings are capped at SNA due to noise concerns, Long Beach nixed any plans to expand when it told JetBlue off earlier this year due to noise concerns, and Burbank is tiny. Ontario is the only other airport that has any breathing room, but not nearly enough to support 50m passengers

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