Aside from a handful of senior regional pilots looking to close out their final working years before retirement in nicer equipment, anyone would be hard pressed to find regional pilots cheering about 100+ seat airplanes flown by regionals. The vast majority of us would be happy to see the regionals shrink and mainlines grow - why would we want to fly a 100 seater for less money and reduce our upward mobility by not seeing the mainline grow? However, if 100 seat airplanes come to Horizon, that will not be Horizons fault. Any regionals out there have scope saying they WON'T fly anything larger than 76 seats? The top priority of every mainline in contract negotiations should be job protection.

All that being said, AAG has stated very plainly that 100 seat airplanes will not come to Horizon. That potentially could have been a diversion so there is no consideration for that as we are now eliminating all jet rates at QX with this new TA (a CS100 would be Q400 + 15% under our current contract), as that could change the nature of negotiations. I doubt that to be the case though. Fact is, with no scope AAG can do what they want, so honest question: why wouldn't they send these to Horizon if they got them? Damage to codeshare relationships? Worried it would freak out Delta enough that they might try to destroy them?

I don't like it, but an 8 year contract + no more jet rates + no mainline scope. If AAG wanted to give the bird to everyone in the industry, they contractually can and seem to have the stage set. I still doubt that is what's going on, but an interesting idea. Alaska pilots need to tie this **** down.