MSP Airport / Metropolitan Airports Commission

[mattaudio]

I wonder how long until we see one of the ME3 carriers at MSP.
My guess? Emirates to DXB, announced 2016, start of service 2017.

[SteveXC500]

What aircraft type do you think they would use? Would need range beyond 7,215 nm based on Great Circle mapping app. Then factor in number of passengers.

[twinkess]

IF they came (I don't know how likely that is): my guess from looking only at their fleet and range/passenger counts would be the 772-LR.

[maxbaby]

Still waiting for British, Lufthansa, Korean and JetBlue.

[MNdible]

There's been a lot of chatter about Delta's recent comments about the availability of ultra-cheap used 777's hitting the market. Pure speculation right now, but one could imagine that if Delta got its mitts on these planes at a good price, we could start to see some up-gauging of some of the trunk routes out of MSP.

[Wedgeguy]

Just don't look for A380 to be landing much here anytime soon. We are just not that big of market unless it has another stop in a much larger market after us.

[grant1simons2]

A333 flew right over my apartment today which came as a shock. Didn't even know I was in a flight path, but it shook the place a little bit.

[exiled_antipodean]

Still waiting for British, Lufthansa, Korean and JetBlue.

We'll be waiting a long, long time ... British is the most likely of the international carriers, and has a lot of destinations in the US but the smallest metro area they fly to where another airline competes is Vegas [Virgin] and that's obviously a special case. Other than that, the routes to LHR they fly with competition are ATL, BOS, SFO, LAX, DFW, IAH, MIA, PHL, SEA and IAD. Those are all much larger metro areas than ours. American gives them non-trivial feed at most of them, or the destinations are important in their own right (ATL, IAH, SFO, SEA).

I just don't see it with Lufthansa either. We're not a United hub, nor is there an industry here that generates the traffic like auto industry helps with DTW-FRA.

Delta's relationship with Korean is in the toilet, largely at Delta's doing.

Jet Blue is a different case, we're a large, rich market they don't seem to have tapped. But so is Chicago, so is Denver, to which they have some flights but not a lot.

[SteveXC500]

It would be great to see JetBlue here and I have heard MSP has been on them every year for several years. But I think we will be waiting a bit too, even for them. MSP has seen quite a bit of growth in the last 5 years with Southwest coming in 2009, Spirit a few years ago, and plenty of additional destinations on Frontier. However, SW has not really added a new city, except some seasonal Spring Break destinations in Florida, for 3 years. Spirit has leveled off in the past year as has Frontier.
I do think it will be interesting to see if Sun Country adds capacity or destinations now that they have reached an official agreement with their pilots.
Additionally, about one year from now, the three new gates at T2 will open up. Who will move there? Airlines from T1? Spirit? SW/SY take them over and grow?

[HiawathaGuy]

Additionally, about one year from now, the three new gates at T2 will open up. Who will move there? Airlines from T1? Spirit? SW/SY take them over and grow?

Those gates are literally to handle the capacity issues that already exist from the airlines there, primarily Southwest & Sun Country. I don't think MAC has made any final decisions about gate swaps/movement officially yet.

[Wedgeguy]

Is there any official word on the expansion of concourse G and more gates for terminal 2 beside the three we were discussing?

[SteveXC500]

Supposedly, the plan for T2 is to add another 2-3 in 2018 on the same end the three are being added now. Then, even beyond 2018, they could add about 10 more on the south end of the terminal.
Haven't heard anything new on G yet.

[SteveXC500]

Delta adding MSP-KEF flight. Looks like it starts May 26th on 757 equipment.

[nate]

Cool news. 2 new international destinations from Delta next year, both coming more or less out of the blue. I wonder if there will be others.

[MSPtoMKE]

Seems clear this is a reaction to Icelandair going year-round on KEF-MSP, as well as increasing some flights to 767... But they are somewhat different markets. Icelandair connects many passengers on to Europe, while Delta will have to rely on connections in MSP with Iceland as the final destination. So in a way this has to do with competition for MSP-Europe, not just MSP-KEF.

[MNdible]

I assumed that you'd be able to make a connection with one of Delta's SkyTeam partners at KEF, but it doesn't look like any of them fly there.

[mattaudio]

Southwest is adding two daily flights to BWI (Baltimore).
http://www.swamedia.com/releases/twice- ... ul?l=en-US

Glad to see this hole in their network being filled in.

[talindsay]

I assumed that you'd be able to make a connection with one of Delta's SkyTeam partners at KEF, but it doesn't look like any of them fly there.

I'd guess the intention is simply, cynically, to make the MSP-KEF leg unprofitable for Icelandair, to reduce competition in our market. Since very little demand exists for flights to Reykjavik, the only thing driving MSP-KEF is connections on to Europe, which are significantly cheaper on Icelandair than on Delta, AF, or KLM. They can drive up Icelandair's costs by producing redundancy in the MSP-KEF market, which then unbalances the supply / demand for KEF-Europe flights since they're no longer tightly bound with the US-KEF flights. This goofs up the massive efficiency Icelandair's highly-symmetrical service model allows.

Delta isn't doing this to address unmet demand on the MSP-KEF route; it's to prevent losing demand on their MSP-AMS, MSP-CDG, and MSP-LGW flights by forcing Icelandair's model out of whack. The massive increase in supply this year should throw Icelandair into a loss on this flight, and cause them to retrench their service. Delta can afford to do that because they're about 500x the size of Icelandair. Just my theory.

[SteveXC500]

Southwest is adding two daily flights to BWI (Baltimore).
http://www.swamedia.com/releases/twice- ... ul?l=en-US

Glad to see this hole in their network being filled in.

Agree! I actually received a tweet from a Dallas News writer for their aviation blog today regarding this. This was after I had tweeted to her a month or so ago regarding SW's limited growth in MSP lately, especially bypassing us to DAL. I thought it was pretty cool she called me out on it after some time. Kudos to her.

[MNdible]

While BWI is definitely a nice pick-up for us, we still need to get a direct flight to Houston or Dallas. Or both.