Originally Posted by
yellowNEO
We just had the Annual Training & Standards Meeting and there haven't been any speculation or rumors to come out of it yet... what gives? Normally there's pie-in-the-sky optomism about umpteen aircraft delieveries per month, hiring 3k pilots in the year ahead, A321/A330/A350 order hallucinations, new bases, etc.
Let's go, people. What do you all have?
When the Boeing strike ends will determine how many new hires we have next year. Based on their marginal delivery capabilities before the strike our new hire plan was 1700. With the strike, that number is slowly decreasing every day.
Won't get any of the current Spirit planes that were just sold as it would take too long to retrofit them to the UA interiors and there are plenty of third world carriers that will fly them in whatever configuration they currently have. We are trying to get more 321 leases and that sounded more promising. Those would be from aircraft that are getting ready to be built for a leasing company that had leases lined up with Spirit, JetBlue, Frontier, etc and now those airlines are delaying their aircraft. We could get those leases resolved early enough so that as the airplane is built it will be in UAs interiors, so ready to go as it comes off the line. That timeline is almost identical to retrofiting current Spirit (or other available NB) aircraft in the used market, so they are definitely more interested in this option.
Looking at WBs in the used world but this seemed less optomistic. Mentioned how the 3 HA 767s did work out, but that they really would want a larger group of aircraft than just 3 if they were going to go down this road. The work to changeout everything to get them in UA configurations requires a substantial amount of work (new STC) for UA maintenance and getting that done for a small number of aircraft hurts the economics. The larger the group of planes the more you can spread the costs of the STC across airplanes and the more it makes sense. Again with Boeing's slow production rates on the 787 it makes them want to get used planes if they can, but there are many others that want those planes as well. Mentioned some possible 777-300s but seemed to downplay that likelyhood and then mentioned some possible 787-8s out there as well.
Made it clear they were always exploring opportunities, but would only do so if it made economic sense. Hopefully the right deal comes along!!