Originally Posted by
Salukidawg
Forget AS at this point. You all couldn't agree on who would run the combined Airline anyway. Why not wait for F9/NK to shake out and then merge with them? Full Airbus fleet and a balanced domestic route network spread evenly throughout the country. AS/B6 would be a barbell network. Strong on the opposite coasts without much of anything in the middle of the country. It would be too reliant on transcons only and that's not sustainable against the Big 4 IMO.
AS has regional feed, which can help with the flyover states. In a hypothetical merger the unions would have to consider whether it might be in everyone's best interest to allow *proportional* growth of the RJ feed to help flesh out the lower density states.
While there was some hope that the regionals would fail and it would all go in-house, the legacies bent over backwards to keep them on life support for better days, so low cost outsourced feed is just a business reality in the competitive landscape going forward.