Originally Posted by
ewrbasedpilot
You're not serious are you? How many LCC's do you see flying B777's on 16 hour routes for $99? How many do you see flying around with $5000 fares? As for thanking CAL, how about thanking SWA for undercutting everyone (try USAirways out of PHL for instance) and driving everyone out of town? B scale wages were the brainchild of Crandall at AMR, thank you very much, NOT CAL as you eloquently point out. I have a lot of friends that work at SWA, but you ARE different than us. As Gordon so eloquently put it one day:
"you can fly CAL and SWA to Paris. Us to Paris, France, them to Paris, TX". Sorry, but your argument is full of holes...............
EWR,
There is that haughtiness that I mentioned. Please don't attempt to give me a history lesson about the airline industry unless you include where CAL fits in. I will go toe to toe with anyone (there is my haughtiness) in airline trivia. Fact is Texas International and CAL tried to put SWA out of business only because they didn't want the competition and wanted to continue to gouge the traveling public to justify their inefficient system. Why fix things when you can just raise prices (even during regulation prices were easy to get approved). Second, you are correct that Crandall came up with the B-scale in response to CAL being subsidized in their first bankruptcy and a recession at the time. When Crandall got caught trying to fix prices out of DFW he ran Braniff out of business and than pointed to low revenues, low wages at CAL, to convince AMR pilots to accept the B-scale.
In reference to how you and your pilots are "different" please do us a favor and elaborate. You certainly were different in the late 80's when I would have stayed in the Marine Corps rather than accept a job at CAL. You were certainly different getting subsidized in your two bankruptcies. CAL is certainly different in its debt to asset ratio and how it needs to gouge customers to make up for an inefficient system. As I said earlier SWA has issues and competitive factors to address or we will be right there with you.
As far as undercutting other airlines goes I will not apologize for giving the traveling public a decent product at a decent price. I am actually proud that some who you feel shouldn't be flying unless they pay a high price are on our planes. If USair or CAL or anyone else can't compete with us than I am not going to apologize for them leaving a certain market. Also, when we do "run" someone out of a market (I prefer the terminology - compete) we don't gouge people just cause we can. On routes that CAL has a monopoly do they charge a "fair" price. I would luv to see some evidence that they don't take advantage of their customers (i.e. 5000 dollar fares or even 1200 dollar fares domestic).
How's that for being serious. As I mentioned before please don't be so haughty without looking in the mirror and remembering where you came from. I certainly know where SWA came from and where we are for now and it looks pretty good so far. Standby though things are always changing in this industry and we will have to adjust. I won't be blaming others for what I don't have (bankruptcy might be the exception).
One last question: Is the reference to LCC for how much you charge the customer or a system that justifies low wages?
