Originally Posted by
Hank Kingsley
Of course, I hope you'd be willing to layover for 4 days, 60 miles from the DMZ. Look at the ATL 777 open time, most guys would rather catch malaria than North Korean incoming.
LOL please. Some love the layovers there too. You may not want to do 28 hour commutable 3 days with free food and drinks because you think being nuked is a threat worthy of bidding around. Ok. If you're worried about being there when "the balloon goes up" then you're probably also cognizant of many other high threat places for violence (particularly against Americans/tourists), disease, war, cartels/kidnapping and natural disasters. But to say Seoul overnights are the apex of danger is pretty silly. To then say we should surrender those block hours because of that is horribly wrong and I don't think you'll find more than a few pilots that would agree with you to that extreme of an extent.
Regardless, its asinine to say (much less to champion) the gutting of our flying (especially at the highest levels) because you're paranoid of a particular layover. And its not as if we can surrender to KA and in exchange they'll give us a disproportionately higher JV presence somewhere else. They want a hub in Seoul, we should get a fair share of the flying. If we don't have fifth freedom flying, then that share should come out of US-Korea (and Korea-US territories as applicable) to reach a fair equilibrium.