Originally Posted by
gloopy
While they don't (and may never) have the pilot capacity to flood high frequency short haul domestic with many thousands of pilots, they'd love to immediately go after the low hanging fruit of pond crossing and trans cons. Even without foreign ownership or cabotage the gulf airlines are gearing up to absolutely bury US airlines in a fare/yield war by dumping unreal amounts of capacity on any and every market they can poach from desperate cash strapped European airlines and then counting on us to look the other way pretending that is somehow part of EU open skies
EK alone is dumping a 380 on MXP-JFK and that's just one of their many, many, many routes they want to do.
Just like the Detroit auto industry learned in the 70s and 80s. If they don't offer a good competitive product at a competitive price, they will face competition from overseas. Nothing new here. Detroit finally got it's act together just recently.
As far as undercutting fares with government subsidies...this is a real concern and is constantly being addressed. Subsidies come in many forms and may even include subsidized training for pilots but this is well known and has been going on forever and will continue to go on. U.S. carriers do the same thing to foreign markets.
It's not really relevant to this thread. We are discussing the issue of the RAA and their continued attempts to derail what has come to be known as the "1500 hour rule." Last time I checked the Regional Airlines Association's carriers don't do much long haul international and as you just stated above, won't be affected by foreign competition.