Delta Adds First Class to New York Shuttle Flights

The Delta and US Airways Shuttles are odd animals. Each airline operates hourly between New York/La Guardia and both Boston and Washington/National and they have special perks you won't find anywhere else. Up until now, Delta ran an all-coach configuration on the sub-one hour flights, but that's about to change. I'm guessing this was strictly an operational decision.

Right now, Delta flies MD-80s with 134 coach seats all with 34 to 36 inches of pitch, a very generous number for coach. Now, those MD-80s will be converted to have 14 first class and 128 in coach. Just looking at those numbers, you can easily see that coach is getting tighter. In fact, it'll drop to 31 to 33 inches of pitch. So why make this change?

You might think that it's a plan to upgrade the Shuttle and make it more competitive, but I doubt that's it. That 14/128 configuration is the same as all the regular MD-80s in the fleet. This means that they can use any MD-80 in the system to operate shuttle flights without having a dedicated fleet. This leads to more efficiencies because you can schedule your fleet better and keep you planes in the air more often. That's a big change from the past. (Anyone else remember when they used to have a dedicated aircraft just sitting there as backup in case the first one filled up?)

Nothing else changes in the service except for the layout of the plane. Will people complain about less legroom? Probably, but the flights are less than an hour. I would think this is worth it to make the change just for operational reasons.