Scambo,

You know my position on our outsourcing. The current crop of 70 to 76 seat jets have roughly MD88 operating numbers per ASM. There will be a niche for them, but as American drops the MD's and leaves us with the highest comparable CASM, the market is ripe for the C Series, or something similar.

The reasons for optimism in 2012 and 2013 are a number of long term initiatives which should begin bearing fruit. We will have the new Atlanta international terminal coming on line just as AirTran/SWA starts capacity adjustments. That should help us both operationally and on the revenue side. Progress is being made on our JFK terminal which should help us in 2013 and network is begining to make noises about bringing a fight for business traffic in LAX. It appears we are ready to take advantage of any disruption in American's operation.

We are under fleeted for a lot of this. Partners will be used to fill far to many holes and we must address that in our negotiations. But, there is enough here to think Delta will have to bring mainline capacity on line and grow staffing.

Operationally, we are running better than we have in years and our targets for 2012 have increased to solid industry leading levels. When you see the resources coming on line to support these levels of performance it looks positive.

The wildcards will be Europe, Fuel and possibly Asia. If Iran tries to block the Strait of Hormuz it would be interesting until there were three more Kilo Class subs on the ocean floor.