Originally Posted by
JamesBond
Well first of all I don't gaf about the small airplanes below mainline. They aren't costing us any jobs at all right now. I sincerely hope the pilot group as a whole has learned that the RJ experiment has been doomed to fail for quite some time and will not waste one copper penny in negotiating it away. It is a dead man walking. DAL has already scaled back far more than either of our competitors. The last I heard, we have over 100 fewer RJs under our umbrella than UAL, and 150 fewer than AAL. I guess there will always be some of that out there, but it's significance is waning with each passing day. But more to the point, when the lift necessitates it - and I assume you are referring to LGA slots - those airplanes will get bigger.
I think the 50 seaters are dead but not the 76. Gaining ground on bottom-end scope is not a top priority of mine but I certainly don't want to go in the other direction and give the company more access to 76 seaters (not that you're suggesting that). Of course in a perfect pilot world we'd just get 2 A220s for every 3 76 seat RJ we've got and the era of regionals would fade into history.