Originally Posted by Svfr

The point of a flow down is not really to be used, but to mitigate furloughs by making them expensive. With no flow Delta furloughs an FO and has one training event when they recall the FO. With a flow to a wholly owned if they furlough the FO they are training that FO as a captain on a new air frame, putting the regional captain through downgrade, and dequaling an FO. Once the mainline FO is recalled they have to do the same process in reverse. Instead of one or two (if they downgrade a captain to fill the mainline FO spot) training events they are now looking at 6 to 8.