Originally Posted by
RockyBoy
Don't you think we could beat WN in a bidding war if we needed too? I think between us and AF/KLM, we can come up with enough coin to win that battle. If we bought AK and took advantage of the overlapping costs and economies of scale with the 737 fleet, maybe we could actually beat WN at their own game on the west coast. We're gonna need something other than a codeshare for LAX and SEA. Their flight ops costs are obviously much higher than ours and I've actually heard that our CASM on the narrowbody fleet is lower than theirs, but that was just hearsay so I'm not sure.
We could but it would cost us and cost us a lot. Their goal may to just drive up the price so we over pay.
My point was that with these JV/Code shares with airlines like AS, MEH, VBX, et al, we are joining forces with companies that are ripe for the taking. By us or someone else. But, when one wants it, another will want it to.
The idea of the code with MEH was great until they were managed in to a hole and bought for pennies on the dollar. I am sure we had part of that, but the fact is that allowing these code shares to be a liberal as they are in Section One really opens up this pilot group to uncharted dangers.
As I stated before, it also opens the business plan up to dangers, where we could not replace the lift quick enough. Think it we lost the AS code. Do we have any jets that could take over a tenth of that flying? Nope, and we would probably not even try.
I hope we do buy them, because we vulnerable if we do not.