Originally Posted by
tsquare
I'm no lawyer.. as I have said elsewhere and also a Kentucky public school graduate, so forgive my ignorance. How does our scope help us when the number of seats are limited that can be sold on (say) AF as DAL coded flights, yet they are flying 380s like nobody's business? They might have to sell 200 seats and give the revenue to DAL, but they have 2000 seats across the Atlantic to JFK whereas we have 214 or 184... IOW, I don't see a limit on the number of flights they can provide across the Atlantic, but only the number of seats that can be revenue shared. So what it seems to me is that we have ceded that market to AF even though we get a piece.. albeit a small one.. of their action. How does this help us? I still see only 34 super premium widebodies on the DAL property.. and that many welded to the terminal every time I am in CDG.
In the AF-KLM-DAL JV it is not just about seats, but ESK's (Equal Seat Kilometers) What that means is that cargo carrying capability as well as seats are taken in to account to come up with the ESK metric for each jet. Because of this one flight of a 380 equates to three flights of a 767ER. We fly about 2/3rds of the block time in the JV but only half of the ESK's.
I have tried to point out that since they cost more them flying larger metal with less block actually works better for the JV partners. (Not us but the airlines) As a result we will see more flying in smaller aircraft like the 767 and 330 here at DAL.