Originally Posted by
Bill Lumberg
There is not a lot of sit time at SWA because a lot of their flying consists of through flights. They may start in BWI, but they stay on the same plane and hit 3 or 4 cities before ending up in ONT. They do that everyday. They fly the max, and are paid well too. We don't do that type of flying, instead relying on hub and spoke, with some waits. Hard to compare. But, we have more variety in flying, and with this TA, higher pay when including the DC funding, which is better overall too. I asked an MCO based captain if he enjoyed his trips and long days with lots of legs, and he said it grew old after year one.
One other area where SW is very efficient is their single aircraft type fleet. While we dead head our pilots all over the world, daily, using up those valuable F/C seats to NRT and back, daily, with crew, instead of HVC's, they don't have to do that. All their pilots are qualified on all their airplanes. Add in all the DL guys stuck in training for all those different aircraft types, no wonder SW is a LOT more efficient than we are.
And now we are going to add yet one more fleet type, to our already inefficient fleet mix. Is there a single airliner we don't fly?
I think we've got every airliner ever produced covered!
Brilliant! I smell Bonus Money!
(for Management, not for us)
Oh wait, we don't have any A380s!
I'm sure that 'Big Airplane order' is right around the corner...
