Originally Posted by
pangolin
ALSO - since it's a 12 month look back in Scope, shouldn't that ALREADY be impacting regional flying?
I believe in most contracts it is applied annually, to avoid the possibility of having to fiddle with regional contracts monthly or whatever, since with some regional contracts (Skywest and Republic) the Major has less immediate control than - for instance — AA does on their WOs. And back on 31 Aug 2019, none of this COVID stuff had really hit yet.
And truthfully, percentage of total Mainline block hours - while written in to several CBA scope contracts, doesn’t ever appear to have been the limiting factor before this rather unique year. But with three months of scarcely any flying and only now starting to exceed 30% YOY, it would take a truly awesome fourth quarter recovery for these clauses not to get triggered. Of course, then it can be delayed - strung out - grieved by the major unions, and ultimately go to arbitration or court.
But from the viewpoint of the major unions, I just don’t see them wanting to grant scope relief from this constraint - not with their own guys on furlough. If you look at the Big Three forums, especially the UA one, there are a lot of angry people who believe their management is using this crisis for putting pressure on the pilots.
UA management was pushing hard for 76 seat scope relief even before this happened. With reduced loads they’d like it even more now. I think they would also prefer to keep regional flying higher to defend gates in their ‘fortress’ hubs to keep out the domestic competition who - at least in the early stage of the recovery - are going to be the LCC/ULCCs.
If they can’t fully utilize their allocated gates they are going to have to let JetBlue and SWA and Spirit and Frontier get their foot in the door.
But to the original question, no, I think more regionals are going to be closing. Compass, TSA, Expressjet.., they are only the start.