Portland International Jetport | PWM

[PWMFlyer]

Meanwhile 77 miles away... United announced today that they're joining Delta in pulling out of MHT. Ending MHT-EWR/IAD by May. This leaves AA as the only legacy carrier in Manchester.

United website still shows just IAD in the summer, where did you see the announcement?

 

[MHT_Spotter]

United website still shows just IAD in the summer, where did you see the announcement?

Last night United switched MHT-EWR to MHT-IAD for March and after May 21st flights weren’t showing up so it was presumed they’d be leaving. But now flights are loaded past May

 

[Cosakita18]

I Stand corrected. It looks like 2-3x daily to IAD starting 5/21.

Interestingly, this leaves MHT with no service to New York City.

 

[TC_zoid]

Braniff Airlines... Back when the flight attendants were more fun and everyone got a proper meal.

 

[RandomWalk]

Vast tracts of…. legroom. It’s a shame what deregulation did to the passenger experience.

 

[PWMFlyer]

am I missing something? Seatbelts... 707?

 

[TC_zoid]

It's a staged picture from a campaign. But I think my implied point is that the industry is so focused on making money now that they have essentially ruined the experience for everyone but the passengers in First Class.

 

[markhb]

I think it's also that, when deregulation made the industry more competitive, competing on price became the norm, which democratized air travel but the reduced income per seat had to be balanced somewhere. in fact, I just looked on WP, and Braniff itself ceased flight operations in 1982, unwilling to compete in the new environment.

 

[RandomWalk]

In the regulated world, carriers didn’t have a ULCC eating their lunch by making the customers hypersensitive to price. Conversely, large swathes of the public could not afford to fly for anything other than a special occasion.

 

[Stlin]

Keep in mind also that in a regulated environment, the only way to compete at all was in the passenger experience. If TWA, United, Braniff and Eastern all operated the same route, and it cost the same, the only way to differentiate themselves was in the pax ex. CAB rules limiting routes and entry and controlling prices meant that airlines were limited to competing only on food, cabin crew quality, and frequency. It's also why loyalty programs came about - it was a reason for business travelers (most back then) to choose United or AA instead of TWA or Eastern - the marketing was the only reason someone would go out of their way to fly with a particular airline. Even before those airlines went out of business, you saw a change in the way they did things pretty much immediately after 1978 and the Airline Deregulation Act - before average load factors were in the 50% range. After, with the freedom to maximize capacity, gone were the onboard piano bars, and came smaller seats.

Also, the CAB fixed fares to distance - so it made sense for the airlines to serve smaller cities with nonstop service, if it meant they could be the only ones serving that market. The hub and spoke model is really a post-deregulation innovation.

Plus, all airlines were, relatively speaking, tiny back then - they just had an outsized presence in our minds, due to omnipresent marketing. In 1978, it's last profitable year, Braniff had a grand total of 92 airplanes. 77 727s, 14 DC8s, and a single 747. That's fewer than Allegiant, which in 2024 has 127 jets. Nationally, all together there were only 2030 of what we would today consider "mainline jets" flying around the US, including some 352 DC9s, which often filled similar roles as today's regional aircraft, carrying a total of 226 Billion revenue passenger seat miles. In 2023, AA alone has a fleet of 965 aircraft with an additional 556 RJs flying under the American Eagle branding for a total of 1521 planes, and flew nearly 232 billion revenue seat miles. In short, today AA alone basically represents the entire sum total of American air travel in 1978.