Originally Posted by
sailingfun
Just curious. The rollout of the 717 was predicated on remapping our regional airlines. That required Delta to renegotiate numerous long term contracts. Do you think the regionals would have agreed to simply slash their fleets absent a agreement to allow them to bring on bigger equipment?
This statement is pretty ignorant, you won't get any support from former or current regional guys with that line. Delta has been reducing all kinds of regional feed without giving said regionals bigger equipment. It's not like the larger aircraft were going to the regionals planes were going away from reliably. While they did use larger aircraft for some companies as a carrot, they also took a lot away without doing so. ExpressJet got to be on both sides of that.
Delta wanted to remove 50 seat a/c anyway. That contract was a scope give, plane and simple. In exchange for reducing the number of planes which they already wanted gone, they got to add more of the planes they wanted.