Sniper

ACA tried to do this in IAD. They owned the RJ gates on the A concourse, essentially every RJ gate in IAD, a monopoly on United Express gates. It seemed like a good position to strong-arm United from.

United (@ huge expense and great inconvenience to their passengers) built a temporary RJ terminal @ IAD and bussed most of their United Express passengers to this facility, until ACA/Independence Air folded. I'm not sure who owns the RJ gates on the A concourse in IAD now, but I'd bet it's United. United should be wise to this kind of 'gate lease leverage', based on their past with ACA (and Delta's with Commair pilots in CVG - never allow your network to be controlled via monopoly by an entity other than your own mainline if at all possible).

How Skywest's future turns out depends not only on the scope/code-share language in the mainline pilot contract (why don't FA's have to do any of this heavy lifting, BTW?), but also on continuing to curry the favor of the mainline management. All the gate leases in the world in outstations mean nothing if the outstation airport manager is faced with the prospect of losing United, Delta, and/or American service to his airport unless he's willing to figure out a way for the big network airlines to continue to serve the field, gate leases be d@mned.

I'm certainly not advocating going without scope/codeshare protection, just bringing up the idea that the future of carrier's like Skywest isn't assured with gate leases. Are there no empty gates @ SMF, ONT, RNO, SAT, AUS, etc.?