[QUOTE=flensr;2384475]
Originally Posted by
3 green
Buy spirit or frontier and get 1400ish current/qualified A320 drivers plus a bunch of fairly new planes that need repainting and new seats... Would that be enough to replace the MDs?
LOL no.
That is literally less than a zero sum game. Any buyout like that would require top dollar to be paid, and then a significant forced divesture to welfare sucking "new entrants" and "LCC's" for pennies on the dollar or possibly even free. The airlines you mentioned are overflowing with pax on limited capacity as it is, so the pilots and planes they would bring are already spoken for. So we'd have to pay top dollar to acquire marketshare only to abandon it to deploy on existing marketshare. Plus the headaches and civil war that would result from a narrow body group chomping at the bit for full relative, or the "Guadalupe" style response to it.
Very expensive and doesn't accomplish very much. Not very likely to happen. Partial asset purchases might be in the cards in the future, or perhaps carve ups, that don't trigger merger language or DOJ divestures, but the easiest and cheapest way is just to do it ourselves. (ditto for UAL, AA, etc).