Delta Air Lines Announces Miami Expansion

Was hoping Delta would bring back LAX & add AUS. But I guess this is a start.

"What needs to happen, is a high speed rail connecting Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville. And we have airline industry lobby to thank for never gonna have those." They're literally building that right now, except for JAX. I doubt JAX will be connected to it. Not enough traffic for that to make financial sense. MIA to MCO to TPA is already under construction, though. A spur from MCO to WDW is also planned. To the people saying SLC and RDU are weird to add before LAX or DCA/IAD: No, they're not. SLC is a major Delta hub and RDU is Delta's largest focus city. Delta can route traffic from anywhere in the West to MIA via SLC. LAX would be much more out of the way to route people from most of the West to MIA, though I wouldn't be surprised to see them eventually add that route, too. BNA and/or AUS also seem likely, both being growing DL focus cities. AUS is probably more likely than BNA, since ATL is already on the way to MIA from BNA, but not so much from AUS.

11 E75 flights, which explains RDU as they can use Endeavor planes and crew. This is very similar to how they slowly built up RDU, although a lot of RDU was CR9 instead of E75. Then you have SLC for the missionaries, as was previously mentioned. The question is whether we are going to see a city like TPA also connect to AUS, and start to build an Endeavor RJ mesh network.

While I'm sure many would love LAX-MIA, they probably want it for domestic O&D traffic. This market is probably saturated with (reluctantly) loyal AA flyers for the non-stop service. If Delta wanted to connect LA (and surrounding Southern CA region) with medium/large non-hub cities in the South East, wouldn't they do through ATL? I suppose the next-gen aircraft like the A220 could do this economically, but isn't LAX already constrained? I suppose MIA-LAX could be a bit of a "loss-leader" at some point to gain overall market share in the LA and Miami markets. Other than shifting excess capacity or lower yielding traffic through a secondary hub, I'm curious how MIA-LAX would make sense for LATAM feed. If LATAM connections are important on the West Coast, why not just provide feed to their flights at LAX? I recognize MIA has more LATAM service than LAX, but wouldn't it more efficient to use one of LATAM's hubs (e.g., SCL, LIM)? MIA seems like a long ride east to just to go south. Does MIA play a big role for west-coast AA flyers? Or, do they just head south from west-coast?

I’d sure love to see Delta add SEA-MIA with a widebody, even a 763 which they now schedule 1x daily SEA-ATL. It’s just so much more comfortable on a long transcon.