[quote=Scoop;663718]Sailing,

You bring up many good points but left out a few. DAL is losing money - Some of our connection carriers are making money - maybe we are not getting such a good deal after all.

I never said management was good at making deals with anyone. Most of our connectors however have pilots on the street.

Southwest, Airtran, Jetblue - all have no DCI type of feed and yet they manage to get by. Different business model you say, I say correct, but if outsourcing is so good why can they not come up with a way to use it to thier advantage?

As their business models change its being looked at. SWA in particular has already employeed it with ATA and wants more.

AMR purchased TWA and this caused thousands of furloughs. DAL had thousands of senior Pilots retire to protect their pensions - I don't feel you can make a fair comparison of furlough numbers.

The thousands of plots you claim retired at Delta were mostly near 60 when they left. All but a handful would have been gone before the age limit increased so they have no real effect on the list today or lack of furloughs.

How can DAL create a "Brand" with 10 different carriers?

From the American Heritage dictionary:

Brand- A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer.

I guess our product for a DAL ticket is flying on any one of 10 airlines, most who owe their position to being the lowest bidder. This does not seem too "distinctive" to me, but hey, I am not in management.

Is the outsourced product (DCI) comparable with DAL?

How about outsourcing the flightcrews, but using DAL gates, gate agents, baggage personnel etc? It seems in some instances we are only outsourcing Pilots and FA's -

This is done often. For the most part however with Atlanta as the exception it is handled by stations without hiring extra personel. The small stations have lots of down time between mainline flights where we pay people to watch TV in the employee lounge. They can fill that down time with RJ flights at no cost! You can't get much more efficient then that.