Originally Posted by
Bucking Bar
Slow,
Your numbers (at least the direction) are probably right, but, Delta has done about everything possible to hurt Comair, following their strike. Pulling Comair's operations down resulted in very inefficient utilization of jets and crews. Sticking them with the old and unloved jets while trading away their new and more efficient jets made them more expensive. Using them as the Crack Spackle to fill in for Mesa killed their operational integrity and increased costs.
There is no doubt Delta is the worst regional airline management team in the history of the business.
Today we could buy AMR and their New York terminal for half of what we paid for Comair.
Comair's problems are not Comair's fault. They are division of Delta and Delta has spent around $18 billion (rough guess) feeding and expanding Comair's competition.
Maybe you can explain it to me, it does not make any sense unless this is some sort of vindictive thing that should be in the special victims unit of some Kentucky family law practice.
Imho they should have either expanded Comair and made it sexy to sell it, or taken it out back and shot it in the head. The "in between" has been painful to watch.
Bar, I agree with some of your points and disagree on others. The following is just my opinion, worth what you paid an anonymous webboard pseudonym for it...
CMR was purchased in October of 1999 not because Delta wanted CMR, but because Delta had lost BizEx to AMR. CMR was also making rumblings of pulling an Independence Air. CVG was completely dependent on CMR, and there was no DTW alternative at the time. It was a defensive purchase. While a premium was paid, if memory serves CMR had a lot of assets and a couple hundred million in cash that transferred directly to Delta. While some of those assets were lost in bankruptcy, as you point out many of them were redistributed. Why would management do that? Not out of spite, but because it made financial (in a bean counting sort of way) sense. The redistributed aircraft were operated at lower costs elsewhere. The asset was still productive to Delta, just not to CMR.
CMR's slow destruction is economic Darwinism. They got too senior and cost too much. Even though their employee payscales were in line with their peers, their longevity makes them 20% more expensive to operate the same aircraft. They got big during Delta's financial duress (2000-2004) and shrank hard during bk and after...it's hard to grow when the parent company is failing. FWIW, those 12 GoJet CRJ-700's are rumored to be CMR tails lost to lower cost SkyWest, Inc. during bankruptcy. Without growth their size and costs worked viciously against them. Now their segment of the industry is consolidating and radically changing; there's no dance partner interested in the CMR name.
jmo, and i'm probably wrong.