Earlier I responded to the idea of replacing RJs with mainline thinking it was a multiple leg flights to the hub, I misread what I quoted. Replacing 3 CRJ-200s with 1 MD88 would not work.
But I like the idea of increasing flying on the mainline side by going point-to-point-to-hub. You don't really kill the frequency doing that you just extend one groups flight time and you free up gates and air traffic doing it. And gates in ATL have become an issue since winglets forced some gates to get too wide to be safe from paint swaps.
But, look at GSP-ATL and GSO-ATL for example. Each has 10 flights a day and I thought GSO-ATL was all CRJ200s but it turns out its a mix of 200s, 700s, 900s, 9s and 88s. Same with GSP.
Now GSP-ATL offers 777 seats a day and GSO-ATL 992. So say that's what the airline wants to keep in terms of seat inventory but the question becomes cost and frequency.
I'd be curious to know what the total cost would be if you replaced 8 of those direct flights from both cities with a GSO-GSP-ATL MD88 flight and kept 2 flights at each as direct MD88 flights?
With that you'll end up offering 1788 seats instead of 1769 per day, so inventory is a near wash but it's all mainline large aircraft (yes I know some like smaller aircraft with valet baggage) but surely total costs are less when you consider everything that goes into multiple DCI contracts, gates, two crews instead of one and so on.
I wonder if that would work?
I know ALPA National wouldn't go for it because its 2 pilots instead of 4. But, if it causes a scope recapture, maybe it's worth it? But we also don't have the efficiencies that say an ASA pilot group has. Someone told me you guys run 21 hour 3-days, we run 15. Sometimes 11 on the 757/737. So if we took 100% of ASA's flying for instance maybe we'd need every ASA pilot plus another 60% or something. I don't know, depends on if I'm dividing this all out correctly. But hey, let's go with my math, it's favorable.
You could also do direct flights and replace 10 flights out of GSP with 5 to 6 MD-88 runs and do the same in GSO with 6 to 7 MD88 runs. Add one to two flights each if you use only DC95s and 717s. It's not a big loss in frequency per se.
The paper is free, so it's fun to guess but that's my 2 cents.
----
Now you said how do mainline guys feel about flying RJ's?
Well, I'd say most RJ pilots now at mainline are all for it. The rest of the group, who knows, and the problem is we may or may not ever find out because it may never make its way to us to vote on. There are a lot of surprisingly very vocal people from different parts of the seniority list, that's a good start.
Let's hope for some unplanned reason the DALPA C2012 survey gets published for all of us to really see where DAL pilots stand. It'd be so interesting to see. But here's top hoping they want to recapture and hire like mad and end whipsawing.
And here's to hoping if anyone stands in the way... ALPA National... they get to feel what a whipsaw feels like via the DPA. It's just business, nothing personal.