^^^ THIS ^^^
Don't forget how we got played in the Virgin Atlantic deal…
While the concept of global production balance
in general is sound, our timing and how it is implemented in the Virgin JV couldn't have been worse. Ever since we've signed that LOA, Virgin has pulled out of non-US international markets and redeployed that capacity on flights to the US.
Network changes | Virgin Atlantic
Had we signed a simple production balance for the Transatlantic, Delta would have been forced to match the Virgin US-flying increases or at least balance the flying by adding many more flights on the Delta side of the Virgin JV.
So while Virgin significantly increased flying to the US, our agreement with a
global production balance conveniently required no growth on DAL flying. In fact Virgin could exclusively shift all flying to exclusively US routes and our Virgin JV LOA wouldn't require any increase of Delta flying at all.
The bottom line, unless we get a global production balance for all JV and codeshare flying and the company actually honors the contract it signed we will once again find ourselves one step behind.
The Mideast carriers are getting all the attention for the
potential flying they could take over "our routes" while our
existing agreements are being ignored for years and flying is going to the "other" guys because we didn't pay attention…
Capacity constraint is nice and good and has provided huge financial benefits to Delta but its time the European partners shoulder some of the capacity reductions instead of Delta pilots...
Cheers
George