Raleigh-Durham International Airport keeps getting mistaken for a hub city. Twice, an airline bet big on connecting flights through RDU. Twice, geography won.
The story starts in 1987, when American Airlines opened a purpose-built Terminal C to run a north-south connecting operation on the East Coast. The carrier, flush from post-deregulation expansion at Dallas/Fort Worth and Chicago O'Hare, saw the fast-growing Research Triangle — three universities, a booming tech and pharma corridor — as the perfect mid-Atlantic funnel point between the Northeast and Florida. Day one launched with service to 38 cities, and RDU got its first international routes: Bermuda, Cancun and Paris Orly, with London Gatwick following in 1994. By late 1992 the hub was running 211 daily departures to 64 destinations, backed by $113 million in airline-guaranteed bonds.
But the numbers never worked. Charlotte Douglas, USAir's fortress hub, sat 130 miles away; Delta's Atlanta megahub 400 miles to the south. A passenger flying Richmond-to-Tampa could connect through either — both closer to more origins, both offering more onward flights than RDU could match. American's hub lost money even at its peak, and in 1995 the airline shut it down alongside its similarly squeezed Nashville operation.
Enter Midway Airlines. The same year American left, this reincarnated startup subleased Terminal C, moved its headquarters to Morrisville, and gave the hub concept another shot with a leaner East Coast network linking the Northeast to Florida. For a while it looked viable: 2,250 local employees, a partnership with American's AAdvantage program, and 13 straight profitable quarters under CEO Robert Ferguson. Then low-cost carriers began undercutting its connecting fares with cheap nonstops, profits evaporated, and after the September 11 attacks grounded US aviation, Midway never recovered. It folded for good in October 2003.
Terminal C — built for connecting banks of passengers — sat mostly empty until demolition in 2016. Yet RDU's story isn't a sad one. The airport rebuilt itself as a point-to-point operation serving around 80 destinations, and Delta now counts it among just three official US focus cities, running roughly 25 routes with up to 65 daily flights. American, ironically, operates its North Carolina operation 130 miles down the interstate in Charlotte.
For travellers, the takeaway is that RDU works better as an origin airport than a connecting one. Flying nonstop from Raleigh-Durham to dozens of domestic cities is easy and often cheap, thanks to the low-cost competition that helped kill the hub model there. If you're connecting between regions, Charlotte or Atlanta will almost always have the edge — the same reason two airlines went bust trying to prove otherwise.
