Great Comment From Paulie

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I don’t check the blog for the weekend and all hell breaks loose holy cow. Here’s the thing with the DCA cuts, this was expected. They’re dropping 3 flights from Boston to DCA going from 13 to 10. But they’re still getting more seats offered on it because all flights will be on A220s and not E190s by then. Do the simple math of number of seats on each plane x the number of flights (1300 vs 1400 so you’re technically getting 100 extra seats).

I mentioned a while back this cut will be happening so this is no shocker. I was expecting it down to 8 flights not 10. The Florida flights they’re getting rid of (FLL 5 to 4, MCO 4 to 3, PBI 3 to 2, Fort Myers gone) isn’t necessarily a bad thing because people would rather go non stop than have a layover so for us in the Northeast, we benefit from that. Plus, some of those routes if you have let’s say the 200 seat A321 doing the route (even though most are with the A320 but for easier math we’ll use that). You go down from 1000 to 800 for FLL (20% seat loss), 800 to 600 for MCO (25% seat loss) and 600 to 400 for West Palm (33% seat loss). Fort Lauderdale if loads have been around 80% then it isn’t affected that much. I remember flying from DCA to MCO last year and the plane was half full and I heard it’s common so no surprise there and with west palm flights being less than 66% full on average is a little surprising but there’s a lot of people (like myself) when we go to West Palm they’ll fly to Fort Lauderdale and then drive the hour up. Fort Myers has so many flights now from breeze and JetBlue has offered new service to some cities like ORH and soon MHT it was bound to happen that something like DCA which is a connection city for JetBlue was going to be axed. Remember too that they’re smallest seat plane is going to be up 44 seats than what it currently is and with flights at under 70% capacity with 100 seat planes, it makes sense to cut them.

Everyone is freaking out about the aircraft deliveries too and them pushing it back, that’s not a shocker at all and is in fact a good thing. The A321s have had engine issues and are taking up to a year to fix for some planes. Airbus and the engine manufacturer have 6 years to figure it out which is plenty of time. Think about it like buying a car, would you rather purchase the car now while it can possibly have issues and set you back more money on fixing the issues and putting it out of service or waiting longer take delivery of it and having it be perfect?

I think Worcester is still fine. We have our regular reductions that start Wednesday for JetBlue so it won’t be bad. If it was that bad, we would have already been gone from JetBlue. Fall isn’t a good time for many for vacationing anyways so it makes sense why flight reductions are happening