So the April COLA award has not been posted and it’s past noon, east coast, on 01APR. We also received an obscure email from ALPA yesterday regarding more routes that may have to be flown if grant money is accepted. It makes me think the company may be reconsidering taking the grant money and putting most people on 50hr pay for April; they may want to take a much more draconian measure to conserve cash.
Someone else posted this link but I’ll post it again. These rules put in place for the airline grants by the Secretary of Transportation have HUGE implications for us. The Secretary basically formed his rules to give the Legacies massive relief for reductions in daily flights on a given route, while giving airlines like Spirit and Frontier basically nothing since we typically only operate one flight per day on our routes. The rules could be incremental but they’re not, they target us.
IMO, this is our corrupt U.S. government in action, legacy lobbyists have found their government stooge and now they’re trying to squash us before we emerge with our “huge cost advantage” [Biffle quote] on the other side of this. If we aren’t allowed exemptions on the majority of our routes, I see no advantages to them taking the grant money; and this is unlikely a coincidence and more likely by design to hurt us.
Excerpt from Reuter’s:
The department said carriers that flew domestically between cities five days a week or more before the impact of the coronavirus pandemic would need to continue to provide at least one flight per day five times a week between the points.
Those routes with fewer flights would only need to be flown once per week. For cities where there are multiple airports, carriers could consolidate operations at a single airport.
The department said airlines could seek waivers for specific flights, saying that “even with these reduced service levels, it may not be practicable for covered carriers to serve all points previously served.”
Reuters: U.S. backs minimum flights on airline routes in assistance review