For those of us that travel west, this is sad but was a clearly impending development:
Harrisburg International Airport will lose daily nonstop flights to Pittsburgh at the beginning of September, airport spokesman Scott Miller said today.US Airways has decided to eliminate its two daily nonstop flights from HIA to Pittsburgh, Miller said. US Airways did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
For the first 10 years that we lived in Central Pennsylvania, we probably flew US Airways 80% of the time. There were two main reasons for this:
The price out of Harrisburg on US Airways was very competitive with any other airport, as we were almost always flying to San Francisco.
We hate O'Hare as a transfer spot, and the Pittsburgh airport is great, and particularly easy when you have small kids.
So, cost and convenience, plus the flexibility of all the flights out of Harrisburg to Pittsburgh and then connecting directly to the West Coast, was cake.
Of course, US Airways' troubles ended that. First, their prices out of Harrisburg increased ridiculously, especially since we could find considerably lower priced flights out of Baltimore or Philly to the West Coast. Second, the cut back in flights out of Harrisburg to Pittsburgh made it a lot less convenient. It was a slow, but seemingly certain, demise in Harrisburg.
Harrisburg really needs a quality low-cost carrier to get flyers to a major hub to go elsewhere. Southwest would be great for Harrisburg. And could be great for Pittsburgh as well.