Two things look what the ULCCs have done in Europe. They've decimated the "legacy" carriers over there. Those carriers have started offshoots of their own in order to compete. Second ULCCs are quite a bit of a money press. Their margins are about 50% more than ours.

One issue I have with this is our CASM is around 12¢ per mile. Spirits is 7¢. We could 'compete' all we want but we will lose money and never make it up in volume (the old way of doing business).

That being said we have to stop Spirit and Frontier. If we don't take this stand they will gut our business and our jobs. We'll eventually all be working for an ULCC, Delta and possibly UAL will be OK (Delta has figured out that their brand is important). As posted in this thread we have a horrible 'premium' product and management is more interested in buying back stock than investing in the company right now. Eventually our profits will start to come down and we'll have less and less money to invest back into the company. This is what happened to all the legacies over the past 15 years, a long slow death.

 

Perhaps we should start our own LC subsidiary- we could call it something clever like, oh I don't know; Metrojet.

 

What about Song, or Ted?

 

How do these checked baggage rules effect standby (employee) passengers?

 

I wouldn't expect anything to change with our checked bag policy, if you are referring to the carry on bag policy (the new basic fare does not include any access to overhead bin space), it could actually help the non-revs find overhead space after the standby list gets cleared. This is all theory now, but it would seem that a certain percentage of passengers that are not using the overheads should help. On a full flight they usually run out of space during boarding group 3.

 

I definitely didn't mean to sound so ungrateful or look a gift horse in the mouth. The crew was great all around (even got a bottle of water from the FAs). I was just surprised at the limited legroom, and I wouldn't be a pilot if I didn't find something to b!tch about.

 

This. The ME3 and foreign airlines blow our premium product out of the water. Now with transatlantic ULCCs they will siphon off the low fare passengers too. Combined with domestic ULCCs we are facing a serious threat and I'm just happy management is trying to compete.

I honestly don't think anyone hired in the last few years will ever see the left seat of a group 4 airplane here. I don't think AA will go out of business but I can totally see constant shrinkage down to just connecting international travelers and domestic flying from our fortress hubs.

If cabotage goes away then all that even may be in jeopardy. The only constant is change.

 

It will be entertaining watching the pajama bottom flyers arguing that their 26x14x10 roll-a-board is really a computer case and can fit under the seat. ("i do it all the time")