Originally Posted by
flyingkangaroo
You think that the extra 6 or 7 dollars that ASA pays 700 captains will make a difference? It wont. The truth is that Skywest is trying to find nickle and dime ways to cut cost at ASA when they know the true way to cut millions of dollars in cost is to merge the companies. OO and EV merged would create tens of millions a year in extra income for the company but yet inc. avoids it and is even going to furlough EV pilots because they refuse to merge. The savings of merging the two would be 5 times the ammount of savings skywest inc. would get from furloughing 300 pilots. This is all management bullSh.... and although I have some respect for BH and JA I will be furious if they decide to furlough for a few million dollars that could be saved in many other fashions....
I really think there's a handshake deal between Delta and SkyWest to sell ASA back to Delta in 2010 or whatever the rumor was.
Think about it:
SkyWest buys ASA, transfers a few airplanes, raids the ASA order book, and has those airplanes delivered to SkyWest instead. That way, when ASA is ultimately sold back, all the growth stays on the SkyWest side. I think it's telling that ASA has received only a handful of growth airplanes (that have since been negated by the ATR retirement) since the purchase while SKYW has almost doubled in size.
Delta decides that canceling contracts at the DCI carriers isn't working too well but still has their goal to eliminate hundreds of RJs. Delta buys back ASA once the economy improves and money starts flowing again (for a nice profit to SKYW), parks all the 200s, leaving just the skeleton 700 fleet which is merged into Mesaba/Comair. This has the double effect of reducing the SKYW percentage of DCI ops (which is way too high for Delta's "screw everybody equally" model) and it also eliminates a high-cost carrier that unfortunately performed too well to have their DCI agreement canceled.
This is just my wild speculation, but I just don't see much good happening to ASA... best case scenario is that we retain all of our pilots and keep the 148 airplanes we have.