Originally Posted by
Chimpy
Well, looking at the 10Q I could be wrong but.... it looks like the "operation only lost" $63,000,000 in the first 9 months of the year. They took a write off to purchase $150,000,00.00 of ground equipment, and wrote off $100,000,000 in deferred heavy mx (whatever that means). Total wages & Salaries went up by 30% but ASMs only went up by 15%. They Sold 100M worth of owned AC but spent $600M more on A/C rent. Seems like not being able to Staff, (too little, too late contract cycle wise) not expanding training dept quickly enough, displacing people to staff new bases (causing more attrition) which prevented us from flying the A/C we already had and now we have this Pratt Issue that is further going to hurt. It seems like the ULCC Model is losing some money, but the real issue is mishandling of crew & Aircraft capacity?.... I dunno, could be way off but seems like maybe it's more of a management related issue than Business model?
A lot of those decisions were made years ago by the genius that thought firing all the gate agents and ground staff and outsourcing was a good idea. Looked good on a spreadsheet but now you have a bunch of people that literally make the operation function and none of them have skin in the game.
This is fundamentally why Southwest was able to scale with at the time was a far inferior product. Employee buy in goes a long way. The employees there made that place an efficiency machine that was able keep people happy and get them where they wanted to go. We don’t do that. We get them there sometimes and late usually while ****ing them off in the process. Can’t scale without repeat business. Only so much low hanging fruit and we’ve picked it all.
Look at the top two in charge and their history. Merger, bankruptcy, strike, scabs, toxic work environments. Should we be surprised?