Originally Posted by
Aero1900
It will be very interesting to see how Bill Franke runs Frontier. The guy has probably the best track record of success of any airline CEO. Will he put up a major fight when it comes time to negotiate a new contract? Absolutely, but who isn't? I'm sure he learned something during the Spirit strike. I'm sure he wont want to go down that road again, but of course he will push us as close as he can.
Frontier needs an injection of money and a new direction forward. Indigo/Franke will provide this. Frontier has already been strongly moving toward the ULCC model, and has been fighting to lower its costs for a long time. This is an airline that has been through bankruptcy and been owned by RAH. I really don't think that Franke is going to all of a sudden make things worse for us.
If Franke was taking over UAL or DAL I would agree with the above comment, but Frontier is already pretty damn close to what he is looking for. I don't see huge changes coming to Frontier that will cause much heart ache for the pilots. What I can see is a higher utilization of the aircraft which could hurt some guys schedules, but I think that FAR 117 should keep that is check.
I see growth, future hires and upgrades at Frontier. Something this place needs really bad. The future is bright at Frontier.
The CASM of NK is 6.9 , Frontiers is 6.4 range on the 319s. The spread is even bigger on the 320s. (7.4 vs. 5.6) So Frontier cannot compete with NK unless they offer flights for high yielding customers. That's why I think F9 will look like EasyJet of Europe vs. NK being similar to Ryanair.