The UPoR had a front page piece Sunday on Charlotte Douglas International Airport’s $1 billion expansion plans. There’s one huge problem with the article though — it’s based upon incomplete analysis of recent events and simple ignores an absolutely critical point. Things go off the rail a few paragraphs in:

You either grow, or risk withering away,” said Jerry Orr, the airport’s aviation director since 1989. He said he believes Charlotte’s airport could one day be bigger than Atlanta’s.

Fueling the airport’s rapid growth in recent years has been a rise in traffic from US Airways, which has increased flights at Charlotte Douglas 22 percent since 2006.

While airport officials and business leaders expect that growth to continue, the expansion plans come amid questions about what Tempe, Ariz.-based US Airways will look like going forward: Will it merge with bankrupt American Airlines? And if it does, will Charlotte Douglas remain a major hub?

US Airways has increased flights here in Charlotte in recent years — as part of its effort to transform itself from an airline that had significant operations at eight airports (Charlotte, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Boston, New York LaGuardia, Washington Reagan National) just after the US Airways/America West merger to one with four hubs (Charlotte, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Reagan National). That transform is complete as of July 11. Or put another way, the days of US Airways growth here in CLT even as the airline overall shrinks have come to an end.

So from now on, for US Airways to add more flights here in Charlotte, it needs to add more planes. Yet the airline has no announced plans to add more planes aside from a very few widebody jets.

This inconvenient fact is simply ignored by “airport officials and business leaders.” Can’t have reality interfere with the wishcasting after all. And that’s exactly what a lot of this is — a desire to be big like Atlanta, facts be damned. And that means to build all those projects that the airport has been talking about doing for the past decade or more — a new international terminal and expanding B Concourse were talked about before 9/11 — and then some. Build it and they will come — even if the main “they” in question keeps says how restricting airline capacity is key. So very typical for Charlotte and so sad.

Updates with a bonus thought: Remember, the Delta Air Lines brand > US Airways brand. And it’s not even close. So talk of CLT> ATL or even CLT = ATL implicitly is supposing that Delta will ebb and US Airways gain strength and market share. Not sure that’s an assumption I’d want to be basing public policy on.