ZeroTT

Lyft and Uber are dependent on an essentially inexhaustible reserve of drivers and cars that go unused 23 hours a day and can enter and exit the market near-instantaneously at near-zero cost. I don’t see any aviation parallels there.

billyho

Yep we'll have more issues then the WO's. We retire over 650 pilots next year. The fact that number will go up each year and it seems we can only train about 650 a year is a much more of a problem to deal with.

I think eventually the WO'ed pilots will be frozen at there airlines however at the same time be given a seniority number. It will be interesting how this goes over in the next 4-5 years.

Name User

Well oil just crossed $70. Highs prices help some of our business (Midwest and south fracking areas now have more money) but hurt overall. So far revenue is not increasing along with costs.

So, it doesn't bode well.

Compare our latest quarterly numbers with SWA, they earned more and had 1/2 the airplanes in their fleet.

Unfortunately Doug has hitched our business model to the expensive CASM RJ.

UPTme

Higher fuel costs help us against ULCC, as their fares rely on their low Ex fuel CASM. So, higher fuel prices hit them harder than they do us. We will be fine. Maybe Dougie will have to only buy back $1 billion in shares this year. Rough life.

Name User

First your comment doesn't make sense. Ex fuel CASM is CASM minus fuel (excluding). Their fares rely on total overall lower costs than competitors. Spirits ex CASM actually decreased last quarter and is forecast to continue dropping.

Their margins go up as we have to raise prices to cover fuel increases.

pitchattitude

Anything that was even near to needing a good connection is still a challenge. We have pretty good GPS, but that is one way and we must have at least five signals. How many times does your wifi/cell/sat lose connection?

TrinityDawn

I’m not nearly as worried about oil prices this time around. The U.S. is probably going to become the biggest producer and exporter of crude this year according to forecasts, and there are a ton of fracking wells and operations that were bought up by investors when the price dropped, just waiting for the time to be right to start pumping again. OPEC screwed themselves by keeping the price so high for so long, and now we have the excess capacity in reserve. The biggest issue is going to be the labor shortage of pilots. (#WKTWH Mr. Glass, and told you as much in bankruptcy.) The zero to hero program started by AAG is an indicator that they are finally admitting the size of the problem. It takes several years to train someone and get them their hours now. Although they will try to hold on to the cheaper labor regional model for as long as possible, sooner or later either they will be forced to place a large group one order at mainline (or transfer 175’s to mainline), or they will need to make the WO regionals the ONLY way to get to AA if they want their regional feed staffed. Merging in the WO’ed airlines to AA would only be their final, last option if everything else they tried had failed. They simply don’t want to give up the pay differences among all the work groups, and lose their whipsawing ability.

SonicFlyer

What the hell does "whipsawing" mean?

ZeroTT

Divide and conquer. Pit Envoy/Piedmont/PSA against each other fighting to please Mainline rather than allowing them to join forces to bargain as a single, powerful entity.

iHateAMR

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envoy_Air

Though I hate quoting Wikipedia, know your history, or maybe you do and I missed the joke!