AirTran placed an order for 100 737's back in summer 2004. Of those, 32 are already on the property with one arriving every month on average. If you listen to AirTran's last webcast when they announced their record profit you'll see that AirTran's growth is very systematically planned and well controlled. Joe Leonard has mentioned that he will keep the airline's expansion at roughly 20 to 25 % every year.

The 737 has a long standing excellent performance record as well as the 717, this of course places excellent control of the maintenance cost. Our load factor in most of our routes is excellent, including the ones we have just started. Our debt is only about 640 million dollars, compared to JB's well over 2.2 billion!!! And both companies have just about the same amount of cash in the bank!!! AirTran basically leases most of our facilities for training, offices, logistics which in turn keeps our cost low. JB actually continues to increase their overhead by building a training center in MCO and if I read correctly they are also going to build a hotel there for their crews in training!!! I also believe that they are spending over 80 million dollars on their terminal in JFK.

JB's new a/c the ERJ 190 is plagged by glitches and mx issues (one of my neighbors works there flying the left seat on the 320 and tells me about this) which come from flying a new design a/c. This has added to JB's amazing increase in maintenance costs.

All in all, I believe that senior management here at AirTran is well aware of the industry status and are making all the right decisions. With all due respect to my fellow professional pilots working at JB the more I read about the financial aspects currently at JB and how much money the are spending compared to their assets and debt, the more I hope that their management changes their views about their expansion and lean it down a bit.

Regards, flytank.