There are some debt payments that come due starting next year. I just tossed my 10k statement that was part of the annual report but I believe it was 330 million next year and around 250 mill per year after that for 8 years. That is what most of us are talking about.

Separate operations are not the huge burden you may think. There are pilot issues that relate to the seniority list such as filling of vacancies and displacements, but from a company standpoint you are not losing too much by having, essentally, two different operations under one certificate. We have the same uniforms, the same FOM, and the same maintenance and ground handling but our ops specs for the West are slightly different (we can do more types of approaches than the East and we have 180 minute ETOPS vs 120). Essentially you have East bases doing their thing and West bases doing theirs. The economies of scale are already there in the size of the two operations,.

Will we be split up? Who knows, but it would not be that hard to do. And while mr Walt may wish us to be taken over by Johhny O, we can honestly say that we have worked for the worst major airline in existence. There's reasons Us Air cratered twice, and those reasons are made abundently clear each time we fly through PHL, CLT or BOS.