forgot to bid

I hear ya Mason. The regionals used to be a place to build time and then progress up. The problem is someone got it in their heads on the mainline side of the equation (not DAL but all mainline) that pay for training ($7K for Beech 1900 or $10K for EMB-120) for a job that paid $12K a year was justifiable because those guys were paying their dues just like the military guys paid theirs. Big mistake.

Because the pay never came up but technology sure got smaller and smaller and soon those commuters had turbofans attached to remakes of their turboprops for those "paying their dues" wages (Coex paid I think in the $20s/hr for ERJ-145 CA when those came out in 1997) and immediately every legacy carrier had the golden opportunity to provide not only jet service but high frequency jet service on routes that did not exist before.

Not to mention that the paying their dues attitude doesn't work either, these pilots are paying $50-$70K for training these days and F-16s flown by pilots paying their dues aren't going to replace DC9s, although that'd be cool and I'd sign up, especially for the single seat F-16s. And so we've got to stop treating them as a training ground because its not, these guys are fully capable of comptently flying a 737 in replacement of us. Its not something they want, but their employers will take larger and larger for less pay if offered and what else can a pilot do? They'll fly it, they can't scope themselves, thats our job.

And I am curious about a scope that was not only for seats but mileage. I wonder if that'd work, but the truth is a lot goes into what makes a route profitable and its not cut and dry and its not one size fits all on the solution. CASM isn't everything, RASM isn't either, margin is. Wherever you can maximize it you will, by whatever means necessary. I look at a route like ATL-PHF, 8 DCI flights and about 480 seats per day. Thats probably all the demand that route will hold with the stiff competition from AirTran, who started the route, and provides 4 of their 717s. We provide double frequency which is our advantage. Just replacing 8 DCIs with 3 MD88s/A320s might not be wise.

Because on a flight by flight comparison the revenue per seat mile minus the RJs pitiful cost per seat mile might be offset by a really good margin because of its frequency, better than 3 MD88s per day. So to the company, yeah the CASM sucks on an RJ but it makes its money on frequency. So its not about having the cheapest airplanes, its about the right airplane. So while I want to say scope mileage, I don't think it'd necessarily work but I wouldn't mind seeing it restricted to only 10% of DCI routes can go over 500 miles, or something like that. But this is also the problem, we let airlines and people get hooked on frequency provided by regionals and not mainline and we're stuck with it until we get some of the under MD88/73N/A319 size flying at mainline again.

I am making this up as I go. Can you tell? All I am saying is we got ourselves in this position as a pilot group and we're going to have to get creative to get out of it.