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.
I have no idea where people get the concept that Delta has lower costs then SWA. We are not even in their ballpark. If you break out our CASM by fleet types it gets even worse since in general the CASM at Delta runs from the largest to the smallest aircraft getting higher as the aircraft gets smaller. For years our lowest CASM aircraft was the 767-400 in the domestic configuration. Here is a link with the 2008 numbers. Very sobering!
http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2...e%20(CASM).htm