Originally Posted by
gloopy
Our AF partner flies 4 mainline flights a day from CDG-SVO and KLM flies 2 mainlines and Aeroflot does 3 including with a 330. Our Aeroflot partner flies more from AMS too. AF flies an A340 to Cairo. You're right about Turkish Air as they've absolutely flooded that market. Some of those markets have a LOT of capacity from our partners and with as large a travel market as the US is, it seems like some of those markets more than supports an ER's worth direct.
It would be interesting to see the total "team" ways to get to all the places we used to fly to as well as to see the number of pax to/from the US for those markets. Major spreadsheet ninja stuff there and I'm not going to do the grunt work but I'm sure its available. Obviously not all would be justified with international directs. Its also notable that if any could be supported by us direct but is instead funneled through partner hubs, its almost always less block hours that we then share for that market (US-CDG only etc) vs the more block hours we would have done ourselves (US-SVO etc) and then add up the totals.
It seems like the "re-kitting" on those routes to funnel through CDG/AMS is more of a win for AF/KML pilots than us. Obviously we wouldn't carry huge losses on some of those markets that wouldn't support a direct, however it seems like some of them would especially seasonally. Instead we split those shorter stage lengths with AF/KML (and maybe Alitalia on and off who knows) and then they get 100% of the additional block hours/ASKMs/etc to our former destinations.
Kind of makes it seem like we should get a greater than 50% deal versus the "half" that's always defined as the absolute rock bottom of the allowable floor in the nonexistant window becaue we'll never break through the top of that window anyway.
Moscow won’t come back until Russia leaves Crimea, stops supporting “rebels” in eastern Ukraine and sanctions are removed. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Seems like other markets would support an ER but I don’t know and do not have the data either. Sailing asserts that Delta makes more money on Delta metal and that seems correct. If we could make a decent yield we would be all over it. Seems more likely that Delta is moving Delta metal to make the most money.