Originally Posted by
IBPilot
someone already did....I'm not the only one that read what you said that way.....
Say you guys cancel a flight due to lack of crews, and they use a colgan Q400 to cover that flight for Delta. That's a scope violation. If Delta however, creates a flight specifically for Colgan under some type of contract separate from pinnacle inc. it is not a scope violation. To my knowledge, such a contract has never existed and colgan has never operated for NW airlink or Delta so there couldn't possibly be a scope violation. The only flying pinnacle inc. does is for Delta, and previously NWA.
And why did XJ holdings purchase Big Sky? Every XJ guy I talked to at the time said it was to get around scope....then they got the parent letter restricting the size of Big Sky...
No that's not the reason, and anyone that tells you this is technically incorrect. At the time Big Sky came around we were a very senior airline with limited growth opportunities. When Big Sky was purchased we believed that they were going to grow Big Sky using profits from Mesaba. We wanted those growth opportunities for ourselves, so we negotiated a scope contract with MAIR under the threat of strike. Thus the MAIR letter came about, if Big Sky had operated larger aircraft it would have been a violation of the MAIR scope letter and not the scope agreement we have with Mesaba.