Originally Posted by
DogWhisperer
Curious....I'm not the sharpest bowling ball in the toolshed but have a thought. During furlough, I flew as a contractor for a Fortune 100 flight department. This company had previously operated a flight department for over 27 years. When the last merger occured, the decision was made to shut the it down and eventually it was outsourced. When asking the CEO if there was a desire to eventually bring it back in house, he responded "why should I? It doesn't make sense financially to do so." He pointed out that all they had to do was cut a check to the "lift providerer" at the end of the month and everything was provided. Further, by having the department contracted out that they had the ability to decuct the operation from the corporate taxes. Additionally, the liabilty for any incidents was now isolated to the "lift provider". This inabled them to dodge any lawsuits associated with crashes, HR issues, etc. My question is does this apply to the various entities providing the DCI? If so, it would go far to explain the insanity of the RJ explosion.
That is part of it, but the fact is that when DCI metal is lost and their are damages with it, they are going to go after the ticket provider too, as they have deeper pockets.
Also DCI expansion could be explained away by one big Band Aid for the 100 seat issue. It is a lot easier to have "Risk Sharing Partners" with these small jets that DAL and every other airline would love to dump once their is a true DC-9 replacement on the market. With having contract for the lift and others signing the dotted line for the leases it allows DAL to keep that liability off the balance sheet. Ugly, not good for our careers but from a corporate perspective it makes a ton of sense.
Think if you were a businessman and knew that you only wanted to use a device for 10 to 15 years, would you buy it or outsource it so you could just not renew the contract when it came due? I know what I would do.
From a pilot perspective it stinks as we have seen our careers stagnate and move backwards. For the company it isolates them from 20 billion dollars in liquidity that they did not have to come up with.
So it short, yes, but DCI has served more than one purpose for DAL.