I'll never fly Big Air as much as I can help it. Always had great service on Airtran.

I have some Doritos. Cool Ranch.

That kind of thing happens when a city lets its airport lose its international hub status.

Yes, unfortunately that is the case. I miss the good 'ol days of TWA when you could get a nonstop flight to basically anywhere in the world out of STL.

I didn't realize STL was responsible for TWA going out of business. Yeah it was nice to get non-connecting flights anywhere, but I'll take losing that (and a major economic boon to the city) over government bailouts of a private corporation any day of the week.

Yeah, STL was in no way responsible. STL did everything they could to keep TWA, including building that new runway. Mid America Airport was even built over on the IL side to act as reliever so TWA would have more gate space for their operations. I think STL did more for TWA than most cities do for their airlines and AA fucked them after promising they wouldn't reduce service at STL when they took over. Now, the new runway sits largely unused because STL's biggest carrier, Southwest, is out of the east terminal at the other side of the tarmac and it costs too much in fuel to taxi to/from the new runway and Mid America Airport has never seen a commercial flight from a major carrier. Thanks AA.

Now if only Southwest would fly international or codeshare with one of the major international carriers like Singapore Airlines or Lufthansa or something so I could fly SW to the connecting city and take the other airline to my destination. And too bad Southwest doesn't fly to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, their 737s are more than capable of it. But at least they're picking up the slack from AA, I'll be taking advantage of their new STL-LAX nonstop service later this summer.

qft. it's exactly that blame the government attitude that has us in a shitstorm of debt. the biggest fault of our legislative bodies (even before said bailouts) is failure to leave shit alone that they have no business doing.

American Airlines already had their hubs in Chicago and Dallas. TWA was the one that had the hub in St. Louis. Obviously something in their business model wasn't working which caused them to go backrupt and so American now had 3 major hubs all located right next to each other in the middle of the US. It's easy to see that you don't need 3 hubs, and 9/11 didn't help either, which is why St. Louis got canned.

The new runway is pretty much for big international flights or a secondary bad weather runway. There are no international flights and even with bad weather all flights can use the one runway. It's understandable that American canned St. Louis because they have enough hubs. A look at the website shows that they are ending many of their flights out of St. Louis in April. It also shows that Southwest is gearing up those same dropped flights in May. Yes, St. Louis is a ghost town right now, but eventually an airline is going to figure out that St. Louis is an international capable airport in a central location that even comes with a backup airport and they'll buy up all the gates. It's just that right now the whole air industry isn't seeing much traffic.

You bring up a good point about too many hubs, but the problem in Chicago is the weather. Their winters are pretty brutal and in the summer, it seems a single raindrop is enough to shut it down. And overall, it's just a very busy airport with frequent delays when weather is good. STL would've served as a good backup hub that they could route to without taking people too far out of the way. Like if you're trying to fly from Kansas City to London via O'Hare and O'Hare gets shut down due to snow, you could be rerouted through STL. Rerouting them through Dallas from a geographical standpoint doesn't make much sense. It's out of the way and is going to add a good 2 or 3 hours to their travel time (and potentially making them miss another connection in London if they have one). And you're right, 9/11 didn't help the situation, but I think STL's days as a hub were numbered even before it.



Actually, and I was surprised to find this out when I was planning a trip to Toronto last summer, but Air Canada does fly between STL and Toronto. But it's by no means a big international flight, it's one of those god awful regional jets.

Ultimately, we drove to Toronto as it was just too expensive to fly for 3 people and the drive only takes a day, but that's how Lambert barely retains it's "International Airport" status. Of course, if by international, you mean another continent besides North America, yeah, those days are gone.

I was only quoting what I heard in the news around the time that it happened. Since I don't live there, and rarely ever fly out of there, I don't have alot of other news input. If my data is incorrect, then I was told wrong by St Louis's friendly liberal media outlets.

Regardless of what went wrong, it sucks that STL has lost hub status.