I do not get why CAL is conforming to the rest of the industries lower bar, instead of taking advantage of their position as a leader and raising the bar for the rest of the airlines. Example... They are the only ones left serving food for free on most of their flights. Instead of advertising this fact and beating up the other majors with this, they cut the number of flights that have meals.

Example... CAL has only one regional airline working for it. This allows a great amount of flexibility when the weather goes down the crapper in IAH or EWR (both notorious for bad delays when the poop hits the fan...) XJT gives up slots, cancels flights, etc, so that CAL flights can maintain more ontime. XJT can drop a IAH-LFT (Layfeyette, LA) turn when there's a 3 hours delay program going, and transition the airplane onto the IAH-DFW flight where the plane is going to be 4 hours late b/c its stuck on the ramp on a refuel stop AT DFW and can't get to IAH. Bring in another carrier like UAL, NWA, AAL, DLA have all done, and the swaps are no longer there that worked so well in the past....

My point is that the bean counters that are now running CAL are just doing that... Looking at the hard numbers and not the intrinsic numbers that make an airline great