Originally Posted by ShyGuy

A SAN base would mean half the bases (3/6) would be exclusive to AS for a major pax airline. ANC, PDX, and SAN. It would help retain and recruit more people to AS.


The NY base was a dead end base, in that where you got in is where you were stuck with very little movement. For a FO, it was a career dead end. Even if NY opened up with 115 pilots again, why would someone come to AS for that when the big 3 have a very large presence in the NYC base? It would really only make a subset of the current pilot list happy. They’re senior enough that they aren’t leaving.

PHX is AA and SW. Losing PHX sims makes less a case for a base. But even if they do, it’s a much bigger AA and SW base. It’ll be very small in size (relatively speaking).

Of all the cities out there, SAN seems to make the strongest case for a pilot base that would help strategically for the airline network, pilot retention and recruitment.