Alright it's easier to tell what you saw then to make a good story, right? In 2008 when we were talking about merging fuel prices were on the rise big time and what was it that we were concerned about on the bottom of the DAL list? Was that our DC9s and 742s would be parked, more pilots than thought would go to the new age 65 and we'd be overstaffed and then there would be furloughs. I'm sure going back a few thousand pages of this one thread we'd see those concerns.

Where did we end though? The company decided to go fat with staffing, the CPZ flow down was an impediment to furloughs, there was a little uptick in travel and the size of the DC95 kept it on property and attrition has allowed some new hires to trickle slowly in. Stagnation abounds though in a lot of locations but how much is because DCI is replacing our flying or age 65? But no furloughs.

A net gain in the fleet would be fantastic. So would putting 88 engines on the DC93 and 95, that'd be a blast. Or getting AAI's 717s. Call me stupid but I'm not letting that go.

I'm not saying we're winning, we're not but we're not losing yet. We are living with OUR sins of the past when it comes to scope but sometimes I wonder if so is the company. There are probably the Harvard types that see DCI as a vital whipsaw but I'm sure there are a few that see what DAL did with DCI as so much more costly than the gains in a whipsaw. Even if they wanted to tell DCI to go to hell they're locked into contracts and a lack of a suitable replacement outside of the 9 and yet, with oil prices, no interest in long term commitment to bringing DCI aircraft to mainline if they'd prefer to part with them.

Our hope, imho, is this thing to plug the loss of narrow body flying with inexpensive, large, mainline jets. Not 787s, not 747s, not 777s. I don't really give a blankty blank about how many pilots a WB requires if it means replacing entire fleets of NB's with DCI at the same time? I don't want to fall to an illusionist trick, sure up the NB flying and sure up the JVs, codeshares and what have you on the WB side.