This has happened before a la MidAtlantic, however I don't see it happening in the near term with Compass. While they may fly the same aircraft, they most certainly are not direct competition for RAH. Compass is strictly an NWA venture and I don't think you're going to see an NWA subsidiary start bidding on RAH's E-jet flying for DAL, UAL, Frontier, or US Air. RAH has no ties to NWA and I haven't even heard the faintest rumor of even trying to get in the door with those guys.

Except for the Compass aircraft, BB pretty much has the options for any other U.S. bound 170/175's locked up through 2009...and as I said before, they're not really direct competition for us. Especially since we can't really accept airframes at any rate faster than we already are.

Also, BB wouldn't move on Compass until they had all their aircraft in place. Plus NWA would have to purchase 10 new airframes. I wouldn't put it past him, but I also wouldn't hold my breath since it would be years before anything would come down the pipe.

Finally, BB is not a fan of consolidating for the heck of it. He's stated several times that from this point forward the company plan is more "home-grown" growth of the business rather than merging with other companies just to get bigger. We've got long term contracts in place with UAL, DAL, US, CAL, and Frontier. The only thing coming up close to this decade is the old TWA/AA flying and God only knows where that's going to go. I don't think there's any interest in renewing since the contract is just a carryover from the TWA days and BB has said numerous times he wants to shift towards competing on the "larger regional" market. The Delta 135's are already gone essentially and I think the AA 140's are next. If was to predict anything, they'll build up the UAL and DAL flying with more 170/175's and move the exsisting 145's on those two codeshares over to CAL to start replacing the CRJ.