Originally Posted by 450knotOffice

They've been down that pathway before. They began American Eagle, the brand, in 1984, contracting with eight different local commuter airlines nationwide. Eventually, AMR decided they wanted more control over their feed, so between 1987 and 1989 they bought out most of those airlines, eventually ending up with four in-house commuter airlines (yes, they were still called commuter airlines back then). Each maintained some anonymity for the first few years (for example, each still maintained their own original company headquarters). By the early 90's, hiring and training for all of the airlines had become integrated and centralized at AMR's headquarters near DFW, yet still AMR maintained each of the four carriers as separate divisions within the American Eagle family. One major reason for this was the thinly veiled ability to play one operator against another during each group's employee contract negotiations - something AMR did very well - transferring aircraft from one certificate to another, furloughing pilots, then re-hiring them (as new hires, mind you) at the division that got the transferred aircraft. Whipsawing was what we called it.

By the mid 90's, however, each of the workgroups from the various airlines ended up becoming represented as single entities, which eventually led to the four airlines having single, all-encompassing contracts covering all of the individual airlines, as opposed to each airline separately. For the pilots, a 16 year, no strike, no lockout, pay-indexed contract was signed in 1997 (as I recall), which led to industry average pay, workrules, etc. No better, no worse. The upside was that it created stability during the turmoil of the early 2000's through about 2012 or so.

Eventually, however, AMR decided that they wanted to be able to negotiate with various independent carriers once again, in order to bring Regional feed costs down. To that end, they began contracting with outside carriers. Eventually, they had contracted out with so many carriers, that they decided American Eagle the airline needed to become American Eagle, the brand - which required a name change for American Eagle Airlines to Envoy.

Since the merge with USAirways, which brought along its own wholly owned Regional Airlines, the newly named AAG now had (has) three separate wholly owned carriers.

So, with that short history lesson, my personal opinion is AAG will likely NOT go back down that long road to consolidation of their feed into one unit. They really never wanted to do that back in the mid 90's, and they spent nearly twenty years trying to back out of that model.