Originally Posted by
Mason32
No, code-shares require APA involvement. The jetBlue thing is an interline agreement... although, for all practical purposes, with all the side letters of agreement to honor eachothers airmiles and do revenue sharing (not profit sharing) they have everything a codeshare does except slapping the AA code on the flight.
But to expound upon your thought further... Eagle would not have to be bought by ANYBODY to do exactly that... AMR could spin Eagle off tomorrow, tear up the one page fee for departure agreement, and then program Sabre to make Eagle the interline partner of choice on the exact same routes they are flying now. Worse, they would then be free to buy as many new and larger planes as they wanted for Eagle to fly them on the interline agreement. The same side contracts they have with jetBlue to honor and award miles programs along with revenue sharing would work there as well... and since it is all going back to the same AMR shareholders, the end result is the money goes back to the same people anyway.
Now, isn't that a scary thought... talk about outsourcing of jobs...
If so, there would be consequences for that. It would be akin to declaring "war" on all mainline labor groups and would turn AA into a war zone. In effect, all the money they might make developing that scenario would likely be lost in the war zone. Worse yet, if such a plan were to blow up (no pun intended) in AMR's face, the damage would be permanant from AA labors perspective. There's enough seething over the enrichment of executives at the expense of employees there as it is.
Additionally, AE simply cannot provide a competitive quality product to that of other mainle operators, Southwest or Jet Blue which is what they'd have to eventually become if the Eagle operation was to morph into anything more then a feeder carrier.
AMR would be taking a REAL gamble with such a scenario. AA will have almost 200 modern 737-800's with decades of life in them, so from a domestic standpoint they're not going to disappear. If AMR wants an Eagle 100 seater operation with a couple of hundred jets, it may be at the expense of their traditional mainline product and that would be seen as a bigger blunder then acquiring TWA under the circumstances it did.