Well based on what you said about how long you wait to let flights turn the corner and the fact that you did nothing to actually refute the fact that BNA was a declining market for David, that leaves me with visions of a newly renovated and re-deserted C Concourse which is depressing. Sure wish you hadn't led us on and let us get used to things if you weren't making money. There's got to be some demand or your most recent cuts to California and Seattle wouldn't have spurred Delta to add a fourth frequency to Memphis and re-instate Salt Lake City service earlier this year. I also don't believe AA would do LAX if that weren't the case and Ontario is LA. I also want to throw out there that I think it is kind of egoish to send the vibe that your doing us a favor and that we wouldn't be a good O&D market without you. In fact, speaking of O&D, when did connecting traffic become an acceptable demand driver for SW who has in the past only done flights based on whether the local market can actually support them? PHL has enough O&D to support more flights than DEN with no connections being a much larger city and even it with that it is a hub too you know. Also, if you are going to start making due with flights supported by connecting traffic then there is no reason that with Nashville you cannot at least add some service to make us more in line with our neighbors of similar size and geography in MEM & CLT who are also driven with connections to supplement their O&D and make routes profitable. And we certainly have an equivalent level of business travelers and HQ's to match their O&D with or without whatever you bring to the table. If you go and look through the Google news archives you'll see that of the three small hubs AA had it was the best and last to close being said to be off the closing list in 1993 by Travel Weekly who said, "Nashville, Tenn., earlier named as a candidate for closure, is now performing 'pretty well' and is no longer at much risk for shutdown, the American spokesman said." Had they not been so interested in Miami, they probably could have stuck it out in Nashville with the final schedule they ran here and made it work like Northwest did in Memphis. Not to mention we've grown quite a bit since then(ie. LP, Nissan North America, Oreck, Dell, etc. etc.). People think of us as the little backwoods city who is nothing but country music but that couldn't be farther from the truth. We also almost had the largest skyscraper outside of New York and Chicago built here before the recession that spawned this(http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-15-south-big-fish_x.htm) article which has to say something and are still in the works to build a convention center and get a medical trade center(http://nashville.bizjournals.com/nashville/stories/2009/08/24/story2.html) despite it. Anyway, there's definitely more potential here than you think(even if it is just 3 or 4 more cities) and this market could do a lot more if someone really sat down and worked with it. Especially if you got a regional partner like you would have with Lynx but I'm confident there are still a few more mainline markets. St. Louis certainly ought to be picked up. I'd be interested to see what your longer response would have been to David if you ever have a non-work time to lay it out there. Try not to bite my head off if you do that though. Enjoy your weekend.
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