Originally Posted by
bored
Again... old news. I think it's obvious where the 50 seat reductions will come from: In the short term: ASA getting rid of 20 out of the DL system, Freedom/ Chautauqua contracts coming up sooner than later and the regularly scheduled 200 returns from Comair.
DL can also get rid of a lot of DCI capacity by returning the saabs, due to their lease clauses and the fact they're operated by a wholly owned (which is exactly why they're doing it.) The first 23 saabs are the equivalent of roughly 16, 50 seaters. The entire saab fleet is roughly the equivalent of 33, 50 seaters. That's significant capacity not bound by a contractors long term agreement or long term lease agreements. They've been actively backfilling the saabs with 200s and thereby reducing frequency and will likely continue to do so.
I find it interesting, but not surprising in DLs disorganization with DCI, that they continue to throw flying towards Pinnacle. In April alone, Mesaba has had to cover nearly 50 flights for Pinnacle. Not to mention the ones we cover for Compass. This is on top of our already allocated flying, plus the up/down gauging within our own fleet. I guess we at XJ know why we haven't gutted our staffing like they could have. It's just so typically DL to gut Pinnacle flying in MSP, reduce XJ 200 block hours and then backfill it with Skywest. Money talks I suppose.
Its not that you are covering pinnacles or compass flights. you are just filling a void created by delta. we have had to do several flights for delta when they downgraded their own airplane and they would do it out of no where and ask us to fly it (I know because i am the guy they keep calling that day to do them). So when we pull a plane to do that flight someone else has to come in and do our original if we dont have an extra plane. We are also flying to all the cities that the saabs are being pulled out of. They are spreading the pain to everyone and everyone is running thin.