Airport #90/100: Pittsburgh (PIT)

Pittsburgh International Airport
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
First visit: 24 June 2019
flighthistorian.com/airports/PIT

Pittsburgh is about a four hour drive from my home near Dayton, which means that it’s in what I call the doughnut zone – airports which are too far to fly from, but too close to fly to as a destination. The only airports I have in that zone tend to be hubs that I connect through, and Pittsburgh is not a hub for any airline I routinely fly, so I’ve never had a chance to connect through there.

Back in 2014, I almost had a chance to visit PIT; we were traveling home from Boston through Newark to Dayton, but the Newark to Dayton flight was cancelled and there wasn’t another flight to Dayton that day. There was a flight to Pittsburgh and we switched to it at first, intending to rent a car to get home from there. Ultimately, though, we changed to a flight the next morning and spent the night near the airport.

Ever since then, I’ve been hoping for a chance to visit PIT, and I eventually got it earlier this week.

I was booked on a Dayton – Chicago O’Hare – Denver route on United, but my first flight was delayed enough to miss my connection, and the airline didn’t have any more seats available on any other Chicago – Denver flights that day, so they sent me from Chicago to Pittsburgh to connect to a Denver-bound flight from there.

It was certainly an odd routing; after two flights, I was further from Denver than when I started. But I was finally able to add PIT to my list as my 90th airport visited.