Originally Posted by Skyvector

ORD isn't shutting down if that's what your worried about. To answer your question, and cr700 already alluded to this, all things indicate the vacancy bid was AA calling Republic's bluff.

The whole thing stunk from the start. The E175 ORD vacancy dropped out of the sky..none of us had any indication it was coming. And then silence...it was weird and I was always suspicious of something going on, I just didn't know what.

I still don't have any concrete evidence, but it would appear that Republic was needing AA to pay them more due to their increased costs and AA didn't want to..as we suspected would happen. Republic wouldnt budge, so AA doubled down and indicated to them that they would just have Envoy replace them in ORD with 20 E175s initially.

Apparently that's when Republic caved and AA withdrew the vacancy. It was a bargaining chip from the beginning.