Skift Take
When airlines reduce capacity it seems like a benign act, but not from the vantage of impacted cities, which suffer the consequences.
Airlines survived $147-a-barrel oil, a financial collapse on Wall Street, and a recession in 2008 by doing two things: slashing capacity -- fewer flights, different-size aircrafts, recalibrated routes -- and charging annoying fees for everything from baggage to "choice" seats.
Nationwide, there are 8 percent fewer airplane seats with passengers in them than five years ago, according to airline analyst Daniel McKenzie, of Buckingham Research Group in New York. He recently analyzed which cities got hardest hit with seat cuts and which had the most growth.
Philadelphia was among the top 10 for seat cutbacks on nonstop flights -- down 15 percent, McKenzie reported.
Philadelphia airport officials dispute that number, and say the decline was more like 9.7 percent.
So what happened in Philadelphia? Simple: Southwest Airlines retreated.
The spunky low-cost carrier arrived in a blaze of glory in 2004. At the time, US Airways was in bankruptcy for a second time and on the verge of extinction.
But since mid-2008, Southwest has gone from a peak of 71 daily nonstops to 20 cities from Philadelphia to 20 weekday departures to nine nonstop destinations now.
Veteran airlin
