Originally Posted by
newarkblows
I really wouldnt put any reasonable amount of assurance on those fleet speculations. They are required and if you look back to CAL's 3rd quarter statement they said 15 Q400's was all they had planned for till 2012 and now three months later they will have 30 by 2012. It is a constantly changing environment and the company can use that to change whatever it wrote in a previous quarterly statement.
If you were talking about adding airplanes to the fleet, then yes I would agree with your comments about not having confidence in "fleet speculations". However, this is not a CAL 3+ year outlook we're talking about here. As far as the parent company US Airways Group, and the relationship with two wholly-owned regional subsidiaries (PDT and PSA), LCC doesn't publish fleet reductions for the current year that are "speculative". If the DH8 reductions don't come from the PDT fleet, they WILL pull them from Mesa.
A similar type of fleet reduction WILL be occuring at US Airways Mainline.
In the closing months of 2008, US Airways stated that they would be taking delivery of 25 aircraft, and removing 29 aircraft from the fleet in 2009, a net loss of 4 aircraft. As such, the current 8-K SEC filing now shows the total mainline fleet going from 354 aircraft to 350 aircraft by the end of 2009, again a net loss of 4 aircraft. US Airways Group has never met a fleet reduction it didn't like.
In the case of these fleet numbers for both Mainline and Express, about the only thing likely to change the outcome would be a court ruling or arbitrators decision as a result of several upcoming grievances.