And if every passenger that traveled that year had paid an extra $14 per one way fare, they could have doubled that profit margin. Revenue management is a complicated business, of course, and passengers are notoriously price conscious, but how much has inflation gone up over the last few years? Would they notice a $14 increase now? That would have doubled pilot pay and then some.

As to your other unsourced argument about the Delta CEO claiming the $500 777 rate would drive an unsustainable $400 737 rate: we don't live in the same world any more. Not even close.

Ways that today is different (I can't believe I have to say this to an airline professional):

• We had over a dozen major carriers
• We had dozens upon dozens of regional carriers to whipsaw
• We did not have the same ancillary revenue streams
• We did not have the unbundling phenomenon
• We did not have rampant inflation
• We did not have the tightest pilot job market in history driving massive pilot wage inflation
• We had a relatively healthy GA where it didn't cost a home mortgage to enter this industry
• We had dozens of pathways to get to airline hiring minimums
• We didn't have the massive incentives from banks paying hundreds of millions of dollars per year to airlines to partner with their credit cards
• We did not have the ATP rule
• We had rates of pay that we still haven't met after 23 years after taking inflation into account
• You purportedly quoted a CEO who was speaking in a negotiating environment, and so was almost certainly lying

The number of seats/premium seats argument obfuscates the real metric: RASM.

The fact of the matter is that SWA and Delta adjusted RASMs are exceptionally close (about 6% off). They can afford it. And the SWA CASM also reflects the fact that the company alleges that it has already been setting money to account for the increase in employee wages they're expecting. They're not putting away enough, because they're not going to get away with the number they think they'll get out of us, but they are already putting aside huge quantities of cash to at least dampen the blow to the earnings when we eventually get a contract.

Another related question for you: what was SWA's profit in 2015, where we were under an abysmal low old contract compared to 2017, where we spent the full year on a new contract that cost them over a billion dollars a year more?

I'll give you a hint. SWA profits increased every year between 2015 and 2017