Originally Posted by
Vsop
No, I’m not advocating that NB are required to do crossings instead of WB. Sorry, if my rambling came accurate that way.
I’m looking for protections against partner carriers swapping their current WB hours for NB and increasing frequency to cover the lost ASMs. Under this TA a partner doing this would lower their WB hours and thus lower our required WB hours since it’s set as a ratio.
This scope agreement has no protections for that, and that is the direction the industry is going. Smaller aircraft on higher frequencies for international. That’s how 787/350 killed off the 747/380, and that’s the sales pitch from Airbus for the 321LR and XLR models.
My thought above was trying to say this agreement at least needs to have a requirement that we have 1:1 growth in this type of flying. Better for us would be all partner long haul hours must equal our WB hours, but I’m more realistic than to expect that.
Since we set a baseline back in 2019, seems to me that the down gauging Delta’s partners have done during COVID, and are forecast to continue to do, and the up gauging that Delta is currently doing make the decision to do block hours instead of seat miles obvious. Surprising that management agreed to it.
Is there a single one of our partner European carriers who has said they intend to send NB aircraft to the US? If trans oceanic narrow bodies were the panacea for our foreign carriers that some of you believe they are, why isn’t it common knowledge that they are including it in their business plan?
On the flip side, if we had to count their narrow bodies on one side of the ledger, do you think there’s a world in which we wouldn’t have to also count ours? Do we want to give growth credit on an equivalent basis to narrow body aircraft? What would we even be asking for?
I highly doubt management at Air France, KLM, or Virgin is are in cahoots with Delta management on this one and concealing their plans to conquer the ATS with narrow body aircraft after Global Scope passes, causing all our base are belong to them.
Plus, I remember reading at one time that the 321XLR did in fact have a 4700 mile test flight. They had to fly at something ridiculous like Mach 0.68, take no cargo, and fly an incredibly sparse cabin configuration. And now the airframe that did that can’t get certified because they were using the belly skin as the aux fuel tank wall without a second wall or safety liner to save weight.
Highly doubtful that aircraft ever enters commercial service with any reasonable seat configuration for anything but near Europe from the northeast US.