Originally Posted by symbian simian

The thing is, it is hard to figure out...
Yes, we have a clearly defined number of crews per plane. And you can calculate some of the cost of that by adding all the pilot slaries together. But there is a lot of other cost, like support staff, training staff, office building, Simulator time, that does not decrease if you furlough crews. And we would not furlough crews, we would furlough junior FOs, so very little cost savings. One of the biggest reasons there weren't more furloughs during the pandemic (outside of gov cheeze) was that the cost to retrain everyone was higher than to offer over 50% pay for people to sit home.

Napkin math:
Furlough 25%, so 1000 on 1st&2nd year pay, downgrade 500 on 5th year pay would save about $180M/yr or $45M/Q. And it would mean 30 aircraft not staffed, but they have no engines anyway...
Sounds great. But NK net loss last Q was over $180M, so you would have to furlough the other 75% of the pilots as well to save enough........ (yes, I know, furloughing the senior would save more)

(What I do find interesting is that the whole strategy of NK was always been based on continued growth. And anytime the growth would slow down the analytst would be worried, and pushed for growth. And now all the analytsts are saying that the ULCC market is only so big, and we can't be profitable at our size. And they have known about basic economy from the legacies forever, and/or should have known the effects of that.)