Originally Posted by sgrd0q
The most amazing figures are these –
This is mind boggling. Forget the fuel cost and forget the pilot cost. The fuel will eventually cost the same after the futures at SWA run out, and the pilot cost is about the same anyway according to the numbers that were posted earlier. But how on earth is the Core Cost so different? We are not talking 10 or 20% - SWA core cost per seat/mile (excluding fuel and labor) is two times lower than the industry average, and 2.5 times lower than CAL's core cost.
I suspect there is an accounting trick here. It may be accountants spinning similar numbers in different ways for the two companies? Who knows.
There is so much that goes into these numbers...everthing except fuel and labor. Lets just look at a few.
(1) Hub & spoke vs Point-to-point. With H&S, there must be a huge labor force standing by for when the bank of planes arrive and then sit idle 'till the next bank several hours later. With PTP, there are just a fraction of those workers on hand but are kept busy all day as the planes trickle through. Also with PTP, we utilize each gate up to 10 times per day. You can't do that with H&S.
(2) Multiple aircraft type fleet vs single airframe. For each type aircraft, there must be different pilots for each plane. If there were four types, one pilot retirement could generate 8 seat movements (huge training costs) also you must store parts for all those different planes. The large panes must have containers and special loading equipment. We have one type of belt loader and no containers.
(3)Food cost. It's expensive to maintain kitchens or contract with LSG for meals. On our longest of fights, we hand out 'snack packs'. I've heard rumor that we only pay for the packaging and Nabisco pays for all the contents as a marketing arrangement.
Originally Posted by sgrd0q
Very surprising. It seems like pilots on average fly less than the monthly guarantee, in CAL's case by a lot. If I read the numbers above correctly CAL's pilots fly 53.25 hours per month on average! That truly surprises me as I thought everybody worked a lot more. This may be the biggest reason why even though SWA's pay-scale is substantially higher the pilot expense per seat/mile is essentially the same as seen here –
Remember, these are averages (total hours flown / total pilots). Management pilots, union officers/reps on trip-pulls, pilots being dead-headed, pilots on reserve, and all those on vacation are being paid but produce no revenue for the company. We approached the company about increasing our ADG (average daily guarantee) to 6.5 trips for pay(5.7hours of pay). We convinced them that it would drive the schedule to be more efficient and the pilots to be more productive. At SWA it is rare to have 'airport time'. I want to spend the least amount of days at work but get the biggest paycheck I can and still have my company to be profitable (I'm also a shareholder). The only way to do this is to fly as close to 8 block hours per day while I'm at work. We don't make money sitting at an airport. Some say that SWA guys work too hard but I find it harder to sit an a airport and not get paid than to actually fly the plane and make sone serious coin. I just added up my block hours this year divided by days flown = 6.33 hous per day. Hope this info is helpful in answering your question.