Originally Posted by
John Pennekamp
100% of operating costs pass through to Delta, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Management has said publicly that the excess costs of flight crew overstaffing are on us. I have no reason to believe that they are not being truthful.
And it will be renegotiated again. The 80% WILL be gone. Delta has no other choice.
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See the above. Delta is holding a gun to ASA's head right now and saying "let's negotiate".
It takes two to negotiate. Delta may not have a choice given their growth plans, but SkyWest sure does. You think they're going to voluntarily sign away their biggest protection?
So let me get this straight. ASA's outstation operations are now up for bid to be outsourced? But the sky is not falling? Sounds to me like ASA is being chopped up one limb at a time. We are being prepared to be phased out. We flipped off JA and won the battle, but lost the war. We will now slowly be replaced by SkyWest.
I don't think being replaced by SkyWest is an option. If they were getting the growth then maybe I'd see your side, but all the growth is going away from SkyWest, Inc.
Delta is realizing that SkyWest, Inc. is too big of a player in the DCI game. We control 55% of the daily flights pre-merger. Delta can't cut our operation down (at least as long as our performance metrics stay high), and the only thing they can do is spread the flying out more to reduce our stranglehold.
I think, personally, that ASA wants out of the station staffing business. When we ran the ATL ramp it was different, and we had economies of scale there. Now that we have to manage 30 or so stations, it increases our costs with no real benefit. Easier to just pay the $300 or so per flight, which Delta would pay anyway.
We're not an airline, anyway. We're a contract lift provider. I see us going to a RAH model where we just fly and have a management structure as lean as possible to just support our primary business.
Bottom line is, we have a contract until 2020. It can only be cancelled for certain reasons, and Delta not liking us isn't one of them.