Originally Posted by
JustUnderPar
UPS Airline Management has built a house of cards for peak 2010. ANY glitch in the system will not go well. We have always had plenty of "reserve/rescue" aircraft, crews standing by. Not this year.
I don't want the company to fail and lose money, as this may lengthen my furlough, but that is the ONLY thing that matters at this place. Service Failures. So with that being said I hope this year is less than stellar. I cannot believe I just said that!!
"Management Pilots (yeah right)" hang on. This is only the beginning. Lube up boys. You will need it.
I think you're right to a hopefully large extent. As always, trying to predict what UPS will do is like pushing a blob of mercury around the floor...it goes everywhere and can be dangerous.
As for contract lift, bear in mind the Asian "peak" is around October, when inventories are built up state side. Once that passes, the Kalittas' and other non-scheds will have more free lift to offer to UPS at a premium. I would suspect that they will over contract on "hot" spares all over the place to cover where THEY think the weak points will be. It would be a good idea to closely monitor where they put them so we can plan.
That being said, "business" aside, they do have an almost surreal emotional attachment to "peak", although with the Davis regime in charge now they MAY not regard it quite so religiously and will be willing to take less revenue as they already have so much. I maintain that they are more than willing to lose revenue and market share to break/straight-jacket IPA and Teamsters. I think their plan MAY be to either accomplish that, or if unable play catch up if the economy doesn't double dip, in either of those cases they'll look brilliant. OTOH, if they can't break us and the economy accelerates they will play catch up as usual...in their myopic eyes they can't lose. Many in the X-Files crowd around here speculated that they actually wanted the Teamsters strike in '97, as they thought they had too much capacity/lower yield market share, and that profit margin was more important...kind of like Davis' apparent mentality. Others speculate that they never want more than 2,800 pilots regardless of the economy or system demand...hence the SCS conspiracy theories.
As I said, like mercury.