True.

Some advocate taking it "all" back, but fail to acknowledge that a substantial percentage of flying many regionals do were routes that were NEVER flown by the major they feed. As such, it isn't theirs to take back as they never had it in the first place.

At Eagle, a lot of our current flying was indeed assigned to us by AA/AMR but the pilots on the proerty at the time (already flying their own original routes) had no basis (legal or otherwise) to refuse new flying. Most (senior at least) would have no problem seeing that flying returned to its rightful owners, all though for most junior it would mean unemployment.

The fact is, is that frequency of a route is what customers look for as it involves flexability and thus it's what companies require for profitability. Many routes cannot support acceptable frequency with large mainline aircraft, so either they run 2 flights a day in the hope of filling them up with enough pax to turn a profit or operate smaller aircraft more frequently. For many of this flying and routes, if the smaller regionals stopped flying them, then they would die. Flying them with mainline aircraft or regional aircraft with mainline compensation would probably just force that airline to abandon the route. A byproduct of that is a weaker mainline with less revenue (prehaps picked up by someone else) and a loss of size and jobs at that mainline.

No easy answers here. The fantasy of either eliminating regionals or mainline taking over all their flying (again whether it was originally theirs or not) will only insure weaker and smaller mainline carriers with less employement and slower advancement for those who are fortunate enough to hang on.