Originally Posted by
IPAsallday
I don’t think WB’s are in the near future as much as I would like them. Seeing United and AA each order 50 321XLR. We can do a lot of international flying with that plane. We just have to pump our numbers up. We got like what,16 of them on order. Those are amateur numbers. It’s the 75 killer and we can compete in Europe with it.
The XLR is great for Northeast-Europe secondary city flying. Once you look at ATL/FLL/MCO/DTW/ORD/DFW/IAH/LAS/LAX then the options are pretty limited for the airframe. Additionally LHR slots (and many of the large EU airports) are hard to come by and expensive. Utilizing a WB makes better use of the scarce resource. There is no way in holy hell we'll ever have 10x daily US-LHR flights operated by XLRs.
Originally Posted by
I was inverted
If the NEA gets struck down, or restrictions exist where revenue sharing isn’t allowed and it becomes a simple codeshare, then maybe WBs would make sense. But it’s a whole lot less risk, while still allowing revenue sharing, for jetblue to slap its code on AA’s widebodies and still pull revenue from them (and the NEA as it stands now disallows B6 flying AA code TATL). Then again, the initial term of the NEA ends in what, 2030 or so anyway? So perhaps even if it sticks as is until then, there’s a possibility that WBs are ordered to start sometime around then. But, who knows. Not making any plans to bid WB anytime soon, personally.
Right now JB is gaining valuable knowledge seeing customer itineraries being booked on JB metal connecting to AA metal. Fares, schedules, etc are all being analyzed and they will have a very very good idea what sort of revenue they could expect on a WB flight. I do think it is reasonable to expect the NEA to get neutered which makes the business case for WBs even stronger.