Originally Posted by gloopy

There's a point where anyone will price themselves out of the market. If techers all got paid 14 million per year, we would close all schools. If cops made 6 figures every month, we wouldn't have any. Its been proven that the E190 can be flown with industry average rates and semi-competitive benefits all around. The E170/175 isn't that much smaller so don't tell me (us) that outsourcing hundreds of these jets is the only way to provide for our inflated mainline salaries cause I'm not buying it.

And I don't buy into your Al Gorean predictions of a tipping point that "too expensive" E175's would choke off feed and decimate mainline jobs. Is that theoretically possible if those planes paid a massive, earth shattering salary and compensation package? Sure, I guess. But we all know that was never even on the table. It's worth it to us to bring those jobs in house even at less than DC9 rates, although if you look at the profitability of the company you'd be hard pressed to say that it was 100% necessary to save the integrity of the entire airline industry in the first place.

Would we lose massive amounts of feed if we flew the E175 for, say, 10-15% less than JB's E190 rates? I seriously doubt it would add that much to the bottom line and I don't think you can make the case that it would either. Even full DC9 pay parity wouldn't even come close to breaking the bank, but odds are it would be flown for less than that anyway because that's just how things are arranged right now like it or not, so the costs would be significantly lower in the first place.

We do not need nearly this much outsourcing. It is not goods for us. It does not provide for nor secure mainline jobs. We could do it profitably for significantly more than market RJ rates because we're still not talking that much in actual dollars when spread across the operation, but in the extremely unlikely event that current RJ rates are the only way these planes are going to get off the ground and therefore the only way we can get feed and stay in business, then as a last resort we could insource them at market rates if that was truly the only way. But I do not believe it is.