Originally Posted by
Mesabah
They don't go it alone, they go to other carriers. For example, say you own 200 airplanes, 100 fly for AMR, and 100 fly for DAL. If you can only staff half the aircraft, then you don't staff both at 50%, you staff one at 100%, and simply drop the other ASA. This way you are not in breach of both contracts.
The Delta plan to reset rates looked absolutely genius before the shortage started, now these contracts look like they will be dropped. The reason is because the shortage is beyond the control of regional management, thus the regional can simply walk away from any ASA they choose.
Also, Delta can shut down 9E because of this, and not honor the ASA we have as well, just the SSP and EtD.
Even if all that is true, your baseline assumption is that AA/UA will come in with such sweet offers...that further assumes DL won't at least match or exceed...and DL will wake up with no regionals. That is rediculous and will never happen.
What I really want to know is what is the fate of the 2005 SKYW debacle and how is that going to play out for DL. Regardless of their "second cheapest" mandate or contractual renewals, who owns the gates especially if they decide to leave? Can they use current DCI gates for their IndyAir2.0 fantasy experiment (that will 100% fail despite JA's inflated FFD guaranteed profit and overly compliant work group fueled ego). Other than that, I see zero real danger in anything DCI related for DL.
Worst case, and I mean nuclear apocalypse worst case, DL will have to give some mid contract money to some of the ASA's or possibly throw some mid contract raises at PCL, etc. While I don't see that happening to any significant extent, if it comes down to either that or being the only airline without outsourced lift overnight, they will obviously be more than capabile of weighing the costs of that and adjusting accordingly.
Not to mention there are still way too many RJ's flying around trying to hub raid one another. The 3 legacies could easily lose many hundreds of additional airframes in their combined regional system because all they do is raid eachother's markets 50 or 70 seats at a time, which is as stupid now as it was 10 or 15 years ago.