Originally Posted by
Excargodog
For the Big Three it’s sort of a perfect storm of ugliness. Their big money makers - international and business flying - are hurt the worst and likely to recover the slowest (and for business flying, incompletely). And all the aircraft optimized for those niches must either be parked (driving up overhead costs with non productive assets) or reconfigured (if possible) to support regular domestic flying. At the same time they have had to bribe the personnel flying that equipment to retire or train them (at non trivial cost of both lost productivity and training personnel resources) to fly equipment more suited to regular domestic flying and thereby generating huge costs for the retirees and huge costs for the training churn (which much of the latter will need to be undone if/when international and business flying returns as will the equipment reconfigurations).
. . .
But for the LCC/ULCCs and newbies like Breeze (who figured to lose money the first few years in any event) it won’t be a lost decade. Maybe another year and a half at worst, IMHO.
It’s hard to maintain ant wishful thinking these days, but I’m really hoping the LCC hypotheses might come true. Back in the day, all I wanted was a legacy job to retire from. It didn’t take long being out on the line, flying for each and riding their jump seats, talking to more of their pilots, that I did a big pivot. Back when we could still afford to be picky, I ended up setting my sights on Southwest, Spirit, and Frontier. More or less in that order. I wouldn’t have turned down a legacy offer if that ever came to pass, but I was 110% happy to become a lifer at a LCC or ULCC. Fingers crossed everyone stays afloat in the meantime, but pretty much the only optimism I’m maintaining these days is that the low cost market really grows from this and starts hiring.