Originally Posted by gloopy

The conventional wisdom is they were buffing the books for a better quarter/full year. However I can't see how 150 new hire pilots on staff making training pay would make a dent anyway. My back of the napkin math, with an additive for gusty conditions, says 3 months of 150 pilots making training pay is around 2 million bucks. Plug that into our numbers from last year and you can't even tell a difference. The stock would be exactly where it is now, the debt would be paid off exactly on schedule with exactly the same interest rate and we'd still be paying dividends and buying back shares at peak prices ()

Except now we have to leave revenue and marketshare on the table that we could otherwise do profitably, and as an added bonus, we provide even more opportunity for the endless growth mode airlines to swoop in and take it at an incredible profit for themselves.

We've done a lot of things right lately, but holding off on hiring just for a trinket of paper statistics at the expense of the operation was a bad call.