By eliminating these flights, airlines like Lufthansa and Air France free up gate slots for more profitable routes — usually long-haul flights.
Those planes are usually used on more profitable routes, and it would generally be in United's interests to renegotiate payment terms rather than have those planes repossessed.
AMR Corporation, the parent of American Airlines, said it had raised $2.9 billion in troubled credit markets and would shift to more profitable routes.
But the loan is not contingent on the long-term restructuring of Amtrak proposed by Mr. Mineta last week, which could include breaking up the railroad and possibly allowing outside entities to bid on its more profitable routes.
Cutting trains that did not earn back their direct costs and their share of overhead costs, Mr. Warrington said, reduced the number of passengers fed into the system, some of whom would have continued their trips on more profitable routes.
Rather than hacking away at the number of flights run, the budget carrier merely intends to shift planes to more profitable routes.
One of the most recent announcements on cutbacks was from Delta, which said that it would trim its domestic capacity by up to 20percentt while it adds service on more profitable international routes.
Two, the flights help generate buzz about JetBlue, which hopes that Californians will eventually fly the airline's more profitable long-haul routes, like Long Beach to John F. Kennedy Airport; a fifth flight is being added to that route today.
Europe's national flag-carriers are struggling to stay in short-haul, to ensure they have passengers to feed into their more profitable long-haul routes.
While more than a million passengers have flown on its domestic routes, Virgin Atlantic admitted that demand had been predominantly from point-to-point customers rather than the connecting traffic it had hoped for, feeding more passengers on to its more profitable long-haul routes.
