Las Vegas Is Losing Two of Delta’s Shortest Flights

Delta Air Lines is dropping four domestic routes before the end of the year. LaGuardia to Tulsa ends on 6 November. Two days later, on 8 November, the airline stops flying Las Vegas to John Wayne in Orange County and Las Vegas to San Diego. The last flight from JFK to Milwaukee operates on 18 December. All four are Delta Connection services flown by smaller regional jets, and each carried only one or two departures a day, which is the level at which a route tends to be worth more as an aircraft somewhere else.

The two Las Vegas cuts are the most conspicuous, because they are short hops in a corridor thick with competition. Southwest, Spirit and others fly Las Vegas to both Southern California airports at frequencies Delta never attempted, and a twice-daily regional jet on a route where a rival offers eight flights is a hard product to sell to a business traveller. San Diego and Orange County passengers keep plenty of options; they simply lose the ability to credit the segment to a Delta ticket without connecting.

The New York cuts follow a different logic. Tulsa and Milwaukee are both markets where Delta faces a well-established hub carrier at the other end, and where the New York demand is thin enough that a fifty-seat jet is either full at a low fare or half-empty at a high one. Regional flying has also become materially more expensive as pilot costs have risen, which has pushed every US network airline to re-examine whether small-aircraft routes still earn their keep. Increasingly the answer is no.

Delta has framed the changes as a redeployment rather than a retreat, moving regional and mainline capacity toward premium-heavy hubs and an unusually large international expansion. That is a real strategy, and it is also the shape of a broader shift: US airlines are concentrating on long-haul and on the front of the cabin while thinning the domestic capillaries. If you fly one of these four routes, book what you need before the final dates, because after them the trip becomes a connection.

Sources: Simple Flying, The Bulkhead Seat