Originally Posted by gloopy

Keep in mind the outsourced lift, in addition to being preferred by the company and magically "debt free" is in the form of iron clad long term deals with trillion dollar penalties for breaking, while mainline lift is extremely fungible in comparison. If more capacity cuts are decided on, they will have to come out of mainline because that's how its set up. As some have pointed out, there is plenty of flex within the MBR for domestic and the insane 3 year no floor/quick snapshot AF/KLM JV. We are the shock absorbers, now more than ever.

And then there's mergers. Except Hawaiian, which would pretty much be a plug and play, anything else could equate to significant DL reductions, in some cases right after a very unfavorable relative integration of the whole with subsequent cuts disproportionately effecting the new PMDL side.