Tale of two airports: LAX up, Bob Hope down

The airport that everyone loves to hate somehow keeps packing 'em in, while the regional fields are struggling to keep up. May passenger traffic at LAX was up 10.5 percent from a year earlier (and up 5.3 percent for the first five months of the year). But at Burbank's Bob Hope Airport, passenger traffic fell 6 percent in May (the third straight monthly decline). One explanation for Burbank's troubles is a 6.5 percent drop in available seats, the result of airlines eliminating second-tier airports from their schedules. That helps explain why your plane is always packed. The passenger losses for May are not limited to Bob Hope: Ontario reported a 5.8 percent drop and John Wayne was off 0.6 percent. LAX, for all its perceived problems, is still considered a preferable place to take off and land, with affordable landing fees and easy connections. It's also relatively well-located. That's why the effort to regionalize air traffic has always been a shaky proposition - and I mean going all the way back to the 1960s.(Burbank Leader, Daily Breeze)

From the NYT:

As recently as a decade ago, the airlines put a premium on growth, competed on every possible route and sought to connect to even the farthest outposts. Now, they are emphasizing fiscal discipline, which means paring back service to many cities and forgoing unprofitable destinations altogether as higher fuel prices weigh on their bottom line. "The airlines are shrinking and putting a premium on their core network," said Jeffrey Breen, the founder and president of Cambridge Aviation Research, a consulting firm. "The bottom states have suffered most and have not kept up with the growth in the most robust airports in the country."