US Airways To Skip Pittsburgh For Ceremonial Final Flight
PITTSBURGH (AP) - A former county executive says US Airways is insulting the city that helped give it its start.
A ceremonial final flight for US Airways Flight 1939 is slated for Oct. 16 and will land in Philadelphia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Phoenix; and San Francisco. It notably ignores Pittsburgh, the city where the airline began.
US Airways recently merged with American Airlines, which is based in Fort Worth, Texas. An American Airlines spokesman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Pittsburgh was skipped over because it's not a hub for the airline.
Former Allegheny County Executive Jim Roddey said Thursday the snub represented "maybe the last and final insult."
William Lauer, a principal in Allegheny Capital LLC and a local aviation analyst, said he can't understand why the airline isn't landing one last time in Pittsburgh.
"I think it frankly would be more appropriate than anything else," he said.
Lauer said the ceremonial flight should have included Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and LaGuardia Airport in New York since those cities contributed largely to US Airways' ascent. He said he didn't think the other cities should have been involved in the flight because "I don't think they've had anything to do with the growth of US Airways."
American Airlines is shutting down the airline's flight operations control center in Moon on Sunday. About 650 jobs are going to Fort Worth. Workers at the Moon center had the option of transferring.
The region has had several cutbacks, the biggest of which came in 2004, when the airline shut down its hub in Pittsburgh. The region also has lost a reservations center in Green Tree.
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