Originally Posted by
sailingfun
They could only operate them at the mainline if its on a cost competitive basis. We once again attempted to show that it could be done. We could not produce numbers even close. Thats the fallacy of the operate at the mainline concept. Unless you cost competitive you lose the flying completely and lose the existing mainline flying the feed generated.
This was a bit of a surprise to me since I felt we could be competitive on a 76 seater. It did not turn out to be the case. If it was the case then most managements would operate the aircraft at their mainline fleets. It would be a win win so to speak. Instead after looking at the numbers management teams fight almost to the death to keep the flying at lower cost providers. There is a reason.
Sailing,
Out of curiosity, did the data show we couldn't be cost competitive against DCI or against other mainline aircraft like the 737-700, A319, DC-9, and now the 717?
It seems to me that it would be hard to compete against regional carriers since there are so many and they tend to keep their longevity low in addition to being willing to undercut crew cost. When the cost start to rise the mainline partners starts squeezing and the flying gets transferred to the next regional start-up that will start the longevity all over again. I've said it before, but if we ever outsourced the 737s I believe that it would always be too expensive to recapture that flying as well, not because we couldn't do it competitively but because other pilot groups would be willing to undercut us by at least 30%.
I know that the smaller a plane gets the less efficient it is but I still believe that comparing the current regional fleet to the current small narrow body fleet at Delta makes the 76-86 seat RJ competitive.
Slowplay quoted a number on one of these threads that it would cost 30% more to do the flying ourselves. To me it looks like most of that is crew cost to bring the RJs inline with other narrowbody cost per seat. I'm sure there is a RASM issue but it looks like Delta is doing well by adding the first class seats to the RJ product. By flying them at mainline they could also add more coach seats to help increase the RASM.