You know you unintentionally contradicted yourself here, right? To make the path-breaking DAL deal BB finally budged on price (same with the AC deal for that matter). I already gave background on that "budge" in the post of mine you quoted, so I'm not sure why you felt it necessary to try and tell me about what I seemed to already know.

I'm also familiar with BBDs $500 million write off, and I know the assistance BBD received came from the Canadian federal and Quebec provincial governments and is highly controversial and unpopular up north. That is in large part because BBD has been a mess of a company for a long time, although the new management is a clear improvement. I can't recall the nature of the federal government's assistance off the top of my head, however I believe Quebec bought a $1 billion equity stake in the C Series. Which means that if the program succeeds Quebec can sell that stake at a profit, just like Uncle Sam did in rescuing Chrysler and GM. That may be an outrageous subsidy to some, but it is not so unusual when many thousands of jobs could be lost. Unfortunately for BBD, taking that assistance has opened them up to the charges coming from BA and EMB. I'll let the lawyers and courts slug that one out, at least they get paid to argue over it.

Now, to try and get this thread back on track. Analysts have regularly said UAL has a gap between 76 and 128ish seats, hence the mythical 100 seater we are said to need. I said the other day UAL had no need to replace any -700s or 319s for about five years. Meanwhile, our 150 seat 320s will begin aging out a few years sooner and are not slated for direct replacement as of now. Rather, they are seemingly being replaced by bigger aircraft (aircraft with >166 seats). So, as the 320s start leaving the fleet the 76-128 seat hole that analysts keep talking about will start to become a 76-150 seat hole. I can think of a few ways that hole might get filled... or not. But I'm not up for making a case one way or another, sometimes I just like to sit back and see what folks think.

Anyone care to make a detailed case? (David Puddy - you are forbidden from contributing, I think we already know what case you would make!)