Fair enough, feel free to replace those three letters with LCC/UAL/AMR/ALK/B6/LUV or whatever your favorite three letter cocktail may be.

Everybody always argues over who is doing what flying at what subpar rate of the week while completely ignoring the customer on this 'chicken or the egg'-esque issue of who's to blame for the demise of the professional pilot.

If we step back and look not at who is doing what flying at what pay, but instead take a look at who is serving our customers and at what quality - you can easily see that regardless of who is to blame, the regional product itself needs to be put to pasture. Even the senior 777 captain should be concerned (i know, he isn't) about losing customers to the airlines that don't outsource - simply due to the level of service/quality/professionalism.

Regionals are not regional. We need to call them sub-contractors. Then, we need to understand that YOUR customers do not know/care which subcontractor they are being lifted by, but they do know that they are getting crappy service. The current model is for mainline ABC to replace subcontractor XYZ with LMN which provides equally crappy service at a lower rate. The customer doesn't know or care about who the sub-contractor is, but they will absolutely look at going elsewhere for a better product.

The punk kids with the i-pods and backpacks and gooey hair-gel are shuttling your customers around the country, and they are doing it with YOUR logo on their tail. Time to end scope concessions? I think so.