Originally Posted by
BalloonChaser
Is there any pressure to have management reduce the number of regional flights between city pairs and let our "mainline" aircraft fly the reduced legs - thus reducing/eliminating the need for fuloughs? Seems if you swapped 2-3 RJ flights for 1-2 MD-88's that might help our pilots stay working if this "downturn" gets any larger!? Sorry if I've completely overlooked the obvious contract/scope/alignment of the planets clauses!?...
I'm with you and I'd like to see what DAL would do with their entire network if it was not constrained by DCI contracts. My bet is there would be few CRJ-200s and probably a heck of a lot of CRJ900s/Ejets.
However, don't forget we don't see what revenue management sees when it comes to margin and the sources of income. Some CRJ-200 markets get $1000-$1500 a ticket (look ROA up and I think SDF is the same). Some RJ markets feed a lot of income in for mainline and frequency is key to those markets, so its never as cut and dry, we may lose a lot of money if we replaced 6 CRJ200s with 2 MD88s, maybe not, I don't know what they know.
So while I'd love to cut DCI but I don't want to endanger DALs competitiveness and ability to make money and thus hurt me. So, what I'd really like to do is just
start combining DCI into DAL starting with CPZ and go from there. Then that way
if an Ejet is good for DAL, its good for me too.