Originally Posted by
nene
Right, and uncle sugar covered major portions of the airlines salaries for the two years of covid.
Since the end of covid, the airline environment has been on a profit fever. For y'all equating some magical mgmt ability, it's been a great market for the airlines for the last year that has only been hampered by the lack of available planes and labor.
My whole response was to the opinion of some on this thread on how great a mgmt strategy had been on the recovery.
In hindsight, the fact that the US Govt gave the airlines money (that was free as long as they didn't furlough) which inevitably encouraged them to VEOP and early retire as many things/people as possible, ended up costing the industry $$$$$ because if there had been furloughs, at least the recovery would've snapped back at even a faster pace.
Of course everything about COVID could have been improved if govt/airlines had a 20/20 hindsight mirror.
I disagree with a lot of this.
End of covid was not 24 months ago. Masks ended 16 months ago. Summer of 2022 is when things really started heating up and bookings took off, that was just 12 months ago. As an example, on June 1st 2021, we were still down 30% systemwide as far as pax go. July 1st 2023 was the first time 2019 numbers were exceeded.
The majority of the money given to the airlines was in the form of a loan. AA did pay this back in its entirety IIRC.
Reducing the pilots on property nationwide (DL had similar issues where they put a bunch on the A220 FO bid status to save $) actually increased profits, because it restrained the amount of total flying systemwide which increased ticket prices. This had nothing to do with passenger recovery though (the two were not correlated).
I don't think anyone has claimed AA management are savants.