Originally Posted by VisionWings

FFTpilots.com it’s unofficial. But if you look at top 15 departures for 2024 versus 2025 it’s mighty shocking.


month | 2024 | 2025 | difference | % change YoY

may | 12,881 | 11,530 | -1351 | -10.48%
june | 13,540 | 11,803 |-1,737 | -12.82%
july | 13,787 | 11,924 |-1863 | -13.5%

Block hours are a better metric since departures don’t account for leg length. But yes there was a large and disappointing reduction this summer. Sept block hours are the same as last year. Still not great considering 15 more aircraft and pilots.

Now it could be they’re making this up with newer destinations. But I doubt it. We are constantly told we are overstaffed. This shows not only do we have less departures than we did the previous year. 10% less at minimum. Which would not only mean all the new guys are redundant but so are many of the people hired last year.


At add insult to injury we haven’t had any filings which equate this reduction in aircraft utilization with increased profit. You don’t know that. It’s impossible to say what our profit or losses would have been had we kept a higher utilization schedule. Maybe we would have been worse off? We have people being paid who don’t have places to fly to. I imagine many of these flight attendants hired are also being underutilized because of the current over staffing. More planes isn’t the solution when you have people not being utilized. Depends again. What if we need everybody on Thursday-Monday but not Tuesday and Wednesday. What if we are still just staffed for a full weeks schedule instead of what we are doing now? The problem is we’ve made an experience so cheap that it isn’t worth the price of admission. We don’t have repeat customers to build frequency from many city pairings.


the solution is change top down. Or realistically. Start paying your face of the company the gate agents and increase the standards required for the position. No more yoga pants. Put them in Pant suits that are uniform and pay people to manage the gate agents and operations at hubs and out stations.

Correct the image problem and you maybe can save the company.


But you have a moral problem of people who are working the same job as other carriers but for less income because of mismanagement at the top.
The last few paragraphs changed the subject back to your idea of becoming more like SWA. A bit interesting since SWA is becoming more like us currently.

canary in the coal mine is the 5 years of maybe this year we’ll hit profit while our peers like jetBlue and Spirit fail to bring in their usual margins.

we are a dying model.
We are changing. Change takes time. More Bundled stuff, focus on CC, Bigger front seat, talk of WiFi. Not enough we agree but change is happening regardless.
we are a dying model.

Investment at this stage is likely too late and two wrongs don’t make a right. Meaning a merger with another failing business just hastens our fuel burn to bingo. Maybe again. IMO one of our biggest problems is cancellations and the failure to have backup options for our pax. Delays and misconnect is second worst. A bigger airline with more frequency can mitigate that. The rest of the problems most people can deal with for the price if they could just get there on time.