Jun 14 2010
Um, the end of the San Juan base for AE?
A hat tip to American Eagle’s ALPA chapter braintrust for spotting this seemingly innocuous piece about the Bowler/Garton transition at American Eagle, which drops this nugget:
He confirmed American’s plans to down grade the Caribbean markets where it has historically been the strongest. It is closing its San Juan hub in favor of moving its operations to Miami to support American’s north/south service to New York. He said the ATR 72 was especially useful in Miami given the number of military bases in the region In addition, half the aircraft that were based at San Juan have been moved to Dallas to support American there..
The ‘he’ there appears to be outgoing Bowler. I don’t know how long San Juan has been in the system – it was a frequent starting point for a lot of AE pilots and they had to learn how to fly ATRs pretty damn quickly and pretty damn well in bad weather because it’s not exactly a hub full of milk runs, at least from what I’m told.
Well, that’s pretty interesting. It fits with AMR’s strategy of withdrawing from weak places (we’re looking at you, St. Louis) in order to buttress stronger hubs like Miami, D/FW and Chicago. It’s interesting. But best I can tell AMR/AA/AE has not yet said publicly “by the way, we’re dumping San Juan as a hub and a crew base, so there’s that.” Has it? Remember that I don’t even cover the airline full time any more, and Terry’s out and about for another week, so the answer might be: hey, Eric, you dummy, they said this six months ago. But it seemed to take the AE ALPA guys by surprise, and pretty much nothing gets past them in my experience….
No related posts.