Quote:
Originally Posted by Manitopiaaa
A lot of the Midwest got wrecked by airline consolidation in the 1980s and 1990s, including Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Saint Louis.
Cleveland actually had Continental Airlines flights to London from 1999 to 2010. But that was destroyed due to the Great Recession. And then when demand picked back up, Continental had folded into United and the Cleveland hub was dissolved.
They had flights to Paris in 2009 to 2010 (again a Continental experiment ended by merger/recession).
They even had Icelandair AND Wow Air flights to Reykjavik from 2018-2019. But both overexpanded in the U.S. (I remember 2018 was the "year of Iceland" since $99 fares were all over the news) and had to quickly pull back.
I agree that Cleveland not having a flight to Europe makes no sense. It's not just the metro area, but the entire CSA (3.6 million) that flies out of Cleveland. And now that Youngstown Airport is empty, that's another 650,000 people that split between Cleveland and Pittsburgh airports (it's 1hr from each).
A 4 million person market is definitely enough to accommodate at least a London flight.
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They surely have a demand for that. Brazilian international traffic is heavily centered in São Paulo and the other smaller capitals usually pick Lisbon as their European destination (Porto Alegre, Campinas, Belo Horizonte and the Northeast ones).
Cleveland is a massive market on its own and London is the busiest airport system in the world, with connections to any place.