American’s Atlanta-Washington flights will use E175s with 12 first class seats and 64 in economy. (Image: American)
In domestic route news, American will start a new route out of Atlanta; Alaska Airlines adds another transcontinental route; a new air carrier offers regional service from New Orleans; JetBlue brings a new city into its network; and Frontier adds new rotues.
- Atlanta travelers will get another option to the nation’s capital on January 5. That’s when American Airlines is due to begin new service from ATL to Washington Reagan National Airport, operating five flights a day with E-175s. Delta dominates the ATL-DCA market with 15 daily roundtrips, and Southwest has six. In June 2016, American plans to launch new seasonal service from Washington Reagan National to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, Mass.
- Alaska Airlines has started flying its newest transcontinental route, operating one daily 737 roundtrip between its Seattle hub and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. The carrier also added another new spoke from Seattle — a daily roundtrip to Nashville.
- JetBlue said it will add Nashville to its route network on May 5, 2016, operating a pair of daily roundtrips to Boston Logan and one a day to Ft. Lauderdale.
- Although ultra-low-cost carrier Frontier Airlines has been neglecting its home base of Denver in the past year as it moved into a number of new markets elsewhere, it is apparently getting back to its roots next March, when it will begin service from Denver to Charlotte and Denver to Philadelphia.
- A new company called GLO said it will start regional airline service out of New Orleans‘ Louis Armstrong International Airport next month, operating on a public charter basis and using 30-passenger Saab 340B twin-engine turboprops provided by Corporate Flight Management. The initial schedule calls for twice-daily flights on weekdays to Little Rock, Memphis and Shreveport. “GLO was born out of the recognition that travel options in the South are incredibly limited by existing air carriers,” said company founder Trey Fayard. For details, go to www.FlyGLO.com.
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I just flew JetBlue for the first time last week, and I was very pleasantly surprised. The regular economy seats seemed to have about an inch more space than in other airlines, and it made a world of difference. Glad to see they are expanding their route network. Competition is good.
I’m confused. As a merger condition, AA had to drop the US nonstops from ATL to DCA and the AA nonstops from ATL to LGA. Somehow they added back LGA (albeit until recently on the Envoy-operated CR7, which would seem terribly unpleasant for that distance) and now DCA too. Did they trade other routes to get these back? Thank goodness they’re at least using Republic for this new (old) route, and they’re then switching ATL to LGA back to an Envoy CR7 (insert eye roll).