Originally Posted by
sailingfun
You have a poor understanding of how a global airline needs to function. You also seem to assume that if we ended all the JV's we would do the flying ourselves. Route authorities, politics and economics would insure that never happens or even comes remotely close. Rumor is that our JV negotiations with the Chinese our not going well. If that goes south we are going to lose a bunch of planned international flying as well as all the passengers that would have been fed into our domestic system from China.
That is a great point and something that I've been pondering. It seems with our less than average international presence, somewhere along the line our management may have been asleep at the wheel. Because as you suggest, international route authority does not happen at the snap of DAL's fingers. It seems, based on UAL's and AA's widebody fleet growths compared to DAL's, that our competitors have done a better job of nurturing and growing their international presence.
Now extrapolate that to DAL's future international presence. IF we do get all of our widebody orders (350, 330), that would represent a growth from where we are today. Where will we use them? With our paltry current widebody count, we are getting crowded out of the international markets by our rapidly growing competitors - a market that is finite with external government limitations. This is yet another reason why I don't put a lot of faith in our widebody "orders". The deferral of some of our early 350's only reinforces my doubts.