Originally Posted by
globalexpress
Frankly, I really could care less about the "small potato" stuff because just as is mentioned above, there isn't a company on the planet that doesn't somehow benefit from their respective governments' policies. But again, when a group of airlines receives benefits that are so out of whack that a tiny country in the Middle East can order 100's of widebody aircraft, larger than the entire fleet of aircraft in the US.....something's not right. And, by the way America and Europe, we want to dump these subsidized aircraft on your shores and put US and European airline workers out of work so we can diversify our economies away from oil and keep the gravy trail rollin' for our Sheikhs and self-appointed kings when the oil dries up.
But it's okay for Cathay Pacific to have 100 widebodies and Singapore Airlines to have 100 widebodies?
Could ATL, CLT, DTW, SEA, and many other U.S. hubs support the number of flights they have from a single airline based on the size of those cities?
See the point?, your above argument is fatally flawed. Hubs are the name of the game these days. The ME3 can support those numbers because of their near perfect geographical position. Emirates was the first to truly recognize it. Etihad, Qatar, and now Turkish are expanding on it. They are serving 4 billion people within an 8-9 hour flying radius of their airports. This compared to the 1 billion or less within 8-9 hours of U.S. hub airports.
Those are just the plain simple facts. The U.S. carriers just don't have the geographical position to serve some of the markets as efficiently as the ME3.
You complaint about their size also does not take into consideration the small percentage of their route network and revenue that North America represents. In earlier posts I pointed out that, as an example, the number of aircraft in Emirates fleet to serve their current U.S. flights was something like 15% and total revenue was something similar. So you would punish them for being good at running an airline on the other 85% of their flying not involving the USA?
Typhoonpilot