Recently, Andrew Gideon posted:

On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 09:44:43 +0000, Neil Gould wrote:


Even then, I didn't get the impression that he
was using the term "GA" to refer to us spam can pilots, but to
business jet operations.

My opinion is that this is just a "divide and conquer" approach:

"Corporate GA has more money, so let's go after them. The little guys
won't complain about that. And after corporate GA is used to funding
the airlines, we'll hit the little guys. They don't have much, but
that just means that they cannot fund a PR campaign against us."

You could be right about the intentions of some who espouse that position,
but if I could glean a level of interest based on the respondents in this
broadcast, it didn't seem to get much traction.

[...]
Well, on this point we part ways. 1200s don't "blunder around" in the
airways or in Class A and usually not Class B. Certainly not to the
point where they are an impediment on the system.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used the term "blunder". But a 1200
absolutely can get in the way of airline and corporate GA operations,
at least around here. If I were to choose to practice spiral ascents
and descents around COL, for example, I could put a serious crimp in
EWR outbound traffic to the south (when the wind is blowing the right
way).

I'm sure that ATC would work around this...but that's "work".

Not that it couldn't or doesn't happen, but II would think that such
impositions would have a very small impact on 135 operations.

One interesting bit of the article for me was a rational defense of
hub-and-spoke. Was the speaker wrong?

See above. The only defendant of the hub system that I heard was the
airline rep, and his point was that it provided access to airline
travel from locations such as in Maine that couldn't support direct
airport operations. That is the same justification that created the
hub-and-spoke system. But, other participants and callers challenged
that notion on a number of bases; it just doesn't work in reality. I
thought the discussion touched on much of the rhetoric that we hear,
and debunked a lot of it.

But would dropping H&S further reduce air travel to those "smaller"
destinations? It does appear a reasonable possibility (from my
admittedly ignorant position).

Even the major airlines are putting more small jets into service. Most of
the commercial travel that we've done out of CLE in the last few years
have been on Embraers and 737s. For the really remote areas in Maine, New
Hampshire, etc. VLJs may play a larger roll. Expansion of both of these
should eliminate the need of H & S simply to service these areas. And, it
might eliminate scenarios such as what we ran into trying to book an
upcoming trip to Seattle via Las Vegas. The only available flights from
the major had us flying to Seattle via Houston! Surely, that is not
cost-effective?

Neil