If you’re flying to Dallas or connecting in Dallas on American for Thanksgiving or Christmas, your flight time options this year are going to be a bit more varied: AA is two additional daily flighst between Charlotte and its big Dallas/Fort Worth hub beginning a few days before turkey day. This looks to be a permanent addition, and brings American to seven flights a day on the route, all on 140-seat MD-80 jets. Even before figuring the extra flights in, CLT-DFW on American had the second greatest number of seats per day among non-US Airways service from Charlotte, behind only (duh) Charlotte-Atlanta on Delta Air Lines.
US Airways and American are actually pretty evenly matched on the Charlotte-Dallas route, with each having 40 percent+ market share. Despite the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex being the fifth biggest market from Charlotte (behind only NYC, Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore), American’s additional flights looks to be a response to US Airways having added a lot of capacity on the route over the past two years. US Airways currently flies CLT-DFW eight times a day, all on planes that can carry at least 144 passengers. As recently as the summer of 2008, it only offered five flights a day on the route.
Bonus observation: Oddly, a lot more people fly Charlotte-Dallas (an average of 654 per day in 4Q09, excluding connecting traffic) as compared to Charlotte-Houston (only 299 passengers per day in 4Q09).
