Northwest has recommited itself to Indianapolis as a focus city, or hublet with its latest announcement of service expansion in a press release on Thursday.
Northwest announced for one it is expanding its service to New York’s LaGuardia Airport. When it began this service with its regional partner, Pinnacle Airlines, Indy’s hometown airline, ATA, was still operating full-sized jets to LaGuardia. It discontinued this service, and ironically all of its Indy service, focusing on linking with Southwest at Midway. Northwest will now offer four roundtrip flights to LaGuardia, including one operated by a mainline aircraft, the remainder by 50-seat regional jets with Pinnacle.
Effective November 1 for the winter, it will be offering two flights a day to Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa, Ft. Myers, and Orlando. With the last of this service beginning January 7th, Northwest will grow to 47 flights a day. Nonstop destinations aside from the above include: three flights to Boston, Saturday seasonal service to Cancun, eight flights to Detroit, two flights to Hartford CT, two flights to Kansas City, Las Vegas, two flights to Los Angeles, three to Memphis, five to Minneapolis, three to Philadelphia, two to Raleigh/Durham, San Francisco, seasonally to Seattle, and three flights to Washington National.
While many airlines are decreasing domestic offerings, Northwest is expanding them. It will be adding service from Grand Rapids, MI to LaGuardia November 1st as well. To accomodate its expansion, despite its issues with the union, it announced on Friday it would recall 1,131 flight attendants it laid off by September 30th. The union expressed concerns this action may be in order to bring in trained flight crews who see themselves as lucky to have jobs at all and thus reluctant to walk out should a strike occur.