Scott Kirby, US Airways president, did an interview with the local paper of record. Highlights:

• US Airways has nine “banks” of flights into Charlotte today. A bank is when a group of planes lands, passengers switch planes, and the planes take off again. Some banks could be eliminated, Kirby said.

• There would be less frequent service to nearby cities such as Asheville. Because almost all passengers who fly from Charlotte to Asheville are connecting passengers, they could be routed through Atlanta.

OK, so far so logical. But then we get to:

• All 120 nonstop destinations would remain, including European flights to Frankfurt and London. But the airline might use smaller planes on some routes, as larger planes are switched to Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which is more crowded. Because gates are limited in Atlanta, Kirby said, it would make sense to use larger planes there.

And this would exactly be the big lie. Charlotte may be a strong business market, but the origination and destination numbers on some of the city pairs are, well, a bit weak. Or worse. Like CLT-Mobile, at 24.72 people a day on average, CLT-Jackson, MS is at the massive 31.2 people a day, while the haul to/from Montgomery, AL was 20.65 (all data 2nd quarter, 2005 from DOT statistics). Oh, and the numbers count people going in both directions — so it’s really 15.6 going CLT-JAN and 15.6 doing JAN-CLT. US Airways currently offers 3 flights a day on 50-seat regional jets for these routes (4 to Mobile); that’s 150 seats (200 to Mobile) each way per day. And not all customers even fly nonstop on US Airways; some connect already on Delta. When you cut the feed from places like Asheville coming over Charlotte to connect, that’s simply less warm, paying bodies going to places like Mobile and the rest. Airlines are a study in opportunity costs in action — it’s simply not creadible to argue that all markets would still be viable post-merger even if the combined carrier did what it says it will do.

Bonus observation: CLT is relatively pretty gate-tight in the short run as well. Claiming you’ll run an operation with lots of flights per bank but fewer banks makes it easy for US/DL to say that it would still need all of it’s gates here, that they simply couldn’t be spared for a new entrant like, well, Southwest.