American Airlines is going to close the flight operations center that US Airways maintained in the Pittsburgh area in favor of the larger, more robust center in Fort Worth.  It’s a sensible move on the part of American Airlines but I fully expect Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania based politicians to, once again, decry mergers and their effects.

It is a loss for the Pittsburgh area.  The center employs about 600 people and while those people will in most cases be offered jobs in Forth Worth, that doesn’t do the Pittsburgh area any good.

There will be other impacts to other areas as well.  I fully expect Phoenix to get hit pretty good, for instance.  The reality is that American Airlines (Old) had a great deal of capacity and infrastructure in place.  There is little good reason to adopt a system from US Airways in the integration because in almost every case the AA system will be more robust.  This will lead to more displacement on the US Airways side.

The area where I think AA takes a hit is in servicing the aircraft.  Operations will see US Airways people come in and re-acquaint AA employees with how to run an ontime operation.  I suspect we’ll see the care and feeding of the A320 fleet be tasked over to US Airways stations in many cases as well.  There will be an integration and it won’t be just AA taking over US routes.  But it won’t be delightful for some operations centers such as Pittsburgh.

Filed under: Mergers and Bankruptcy by ajax
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