wjcandee

I agree that furloughs don't make sense, at least as I understand the current situation. Even if Atlas lost several more of the Amazon 767s to Kalitta or whomever, for this reason:

Presumably Atlas wants to keep its AMC flying, and with only one other primary AMC passenger carrier, the Generals most-likely want to keep Atlas flying AMC work.

However, one consequence of the ruling that Atlas can't "outsource" flying is that what would in any other world be subservice for flight protection becomes "prohibited outsourcing". So even occasional flight protection by chartering another carrier is verboten. I think the issue here is that Atlas was abusing subservice and flight protection by scheduling flights that it should have known it couldn't cover and thereby avoiding making labor peace. But the effect of the ruling is that the only way Atlas is going to have an acceptable flight dispatch rate (and other metrics) on the military flying is to have plenty of crews ready to go. Some of that flying is on 767s. They're going to have to increase the staffing on them. They need pilots to do that.

In short, I think that Atlas can lose some frames before its pilots aren't going to be busy. I don't have a sense of how much (if any at all given the previous SHOP campaign) open time flying there is and how much of that actually gets picked up, so I don't know how much reduction in business it takes to clean out that buffer.

I also think that China and Trump are likely to come to some sort of deal in the next six months, largely because China is hurting economically more than it's saying, and it can't afford a declining economy because of the potential for the Hong Kong political unrest to spread to the mainland -- you can't put down a billion-person revolt if it's widely-supported.

A strong economy keeps a lot of citizens in their lane.

A stronger Pacific economy benefits a significant part of Atlas's/DHL's 747 business, and it benefits the LCF business as well (Chinese airlines buying 787s).