The idiotic thing wasn't their answers. They set themselves up for that grilling. The last investors day they laid out a 5 yr plan to match Delta's current profit margin. The insanity in that is that Delta is a different operation with more domestic capacity, they have a well organised, competent management, and they are still riding the wave of one of the most profitable domestic airline periods ever. United saying "we can do that too" is like the kid that is actively eating his own boogers saying he will be an astronaut.

We shrank when we should have been growing, we bet on expensive new airplanes to save fuel only for fuel prices to ease, we were perceived as inconsistent when we withdrew from JFK, shrunk LAX, CLE, IAD, and put our worst product (50 seat RJ's) on big business markets. I love my job here but we aren't Delta. These investors day questions were those people wondering how we were planning on being more like Delta and less like the United of old. We diverged further from Delta this quarter immediately after saying how we were going to chip away at their lead.