Originally Posted by
sailingfun
You should sometime take the time to go over to marketing and talk with the people working in the department. You might actually find you learn something.
Could be buy 737's and jump into those routes? Sure we could to a certain extent. There would be problems. We would need to get gates in SEA. None are available at the moment or planned to come available. If we can work that issue out we then need to take down Alaska. It should be a breeze to knock down the highest rated airline for customer service and the airline with the single most loyal customer base in the world. They will flock to fly on Delta. It will have to be a epic fare war with huge amounts of blood spilled. Can we take Alaska on and attempt to put them under? Thats what it will take to ever make money on matching their routes. I would put it as somewhere around a snowballs chance in hell.
Oh by the way. Have you looked at the actual passenger numbers? How many they send to us and how many we send to them?
Sailing, our US routemap is turning green from left to right. Take a look:
http://images.delta.com.edgesuite.ne...aps/us_map.pdf
When I compare that even to a few years ago, I see us being slowly pushed eastward. It's gone from some in SEA to most N-S west coast flying and lately the trend has been toward transcons. Either they are immune from the economy that's holding us back, or we are planning to hand them a bunch more flying in the next few years. They are increasing their fleet by 20%. I call that big growth in an economic environment that's forcing a lot of carriers, including SWA, to keep flat capacity. Are they stupid to try to grow that much? Or is there a plan to continue to cede our routes to them?
My question: is there a point at which you, or ALPA, will start to be concerned? They own SEA. The latest rumor is that they are moving into SLC and our other hubs. Will we let them have everything west of the Mississippi? For the good of Delta? And the bad of the Delta pilots? At some point, whatever extra revenue is being generated by them flying our pax instead of us flying them will not help us. It would take a lot of 4% raises to make up for 10 more years of stagnation.