I had an arsehole transplant but the arsehole rejected me, which is why I write such rubbish
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: New York, NY, USA
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Jet11..some clarification
I live just outside of Newark now, so EWR, JFK and LGA are relatively easy options to travel. A non-stop fight to the West Coast takes 6 hours of flying. Southwest does it from Islip which is in the middle of Long Island and next to impossible to get to unless you own a car and want to spend 2 -3 hours traversing the NY highways.
As an added bonus, they will fly you to the West Coast via Baltimore, Nashville, Phoenix, Las Vegas etc. Who has the time or patience to spend 12 hours on a plane as opposed to 6. Having said that, if I want to go from PHX to LAS, there is no better choice. They are a great airline.
What really got me wondering though is you comment:
"Passengers could fly to a secondary East Coast airport — which have lower airport charges and would fit the low-cost business model — and connect onwards on a cheap internal flight"
Please be aware none of the secondary East Coast airports you mention have customs or imiigrations near anywhere in scope to handle 300+ passengers at a time. This would require the facilities be expanded and the cost past onto Easy which would make BA, UAL, CAL, AA etc look all the more attractive.
Southwest actually developed a business plan to fly from the West Coast to Hawaii and decided that other airlines were far better suited to providing this service bacause of all the extra costs Southwest would incur, leading to an increase in costs for their passengers. If they had followed their plan to fruition, they wouldn't be a low-cost airline anymore.
Andy