I don’t know how long we have been doing it in the summer but i did it this summer

Good to know. Thanks!

Sent from my SM-G975U1 using Tapatalk

We used to fly Copenhagen from ATL and JFK, and Stockholm from JFK year round. A few years ago, we went seasonal to both destinations, then dropped ATL-CPN (ID?). Then dropped Stockholm completely a year or two ago.

I loved Stockholm, but I could only hold it in January and February when I was on the ER. I’ve never been closer to having my ears literally freeze off than a January night in Stockholm walking back from dinner. WOW, the senior guys knew what they were doing with that one.

There were a few other, um, Oslo, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Hamburg, Lyon, Vienna, etc. Long list.

Careful, Buck Rogers is going to hammer on you next for “complaining”. I think he wants us to believe he’s been here since the Pan Am merger.

Delta moved a lot of Europe destinations to Paris connections flown by AF during the bankruptcy, and Amsterdam shortly after the merger. There used to be a lot more direct routes from the U.S. to medium size European cities before the JVs.

That makes me old, doesn't it:o

That stuff actually went away in the 2009/2010 timeframe with the JV cranking up and the economy in the pooper. It peaked in 2008.

While this is good news, it also bums me out some. When I see other airlines “increase international flying,” they announce new destinations and maybe one extra route to an already served location. For us, it’s the same destinations from just another US city or boosted frequency. Feels like we aren’t trying to become the globally recognized brand like they claim, but more of a brand recognized mostly by Paris, AMS, and London.

Resumption of service, new service...you're really splitting hairs here. We're currently not flying that route, soon we will be. Lol, and some call the millennial generation needy...

In all fairness, you only ever hear about the other airlines opening a new route, but hardly notice the article when they quietly shut that route down the following year. Or that it was only opened after closing another route.

I'd love to fly to every 'burg and 'ville throughout the world, as it would be great to see all those cities on the company's dime. But not at the expense of long term stability and profitablity. Sure we used to go to all those destinations...back when we were happy to just break even or make just a few million and there wasn't a LCC in every city. Not saying that these routes weren't/can't be profitable, but we seem to be doing something right. That's said, we're making ridiculous cash now and we're seeing LCCs fail left and right. Time to explore those destinations again (which is seems they're doing) and see if there is money to be made.

New service, resumption of service -- neither one should matter to pilots, it's growth or stagnation that matter. The company can call it whatever the stuff they want, but if the route is flown by a plane and pilots who used to be on a different route which no longer exists -- the Delta way -- then it's worthless to the pilot group. If the route is flown on a newly acquired plane that didn't replace an old plane and the company had to hire additional pilots to properly staff the new route, then it's a pilot group win.

And for the record, I'm not saying that Delta as a company is stagnated, recapturing regional flying has been awesome for both me and the company. But on the WB side it's been nothing but shuffling the deck chairs.

I think when they talk about our global brand, they’re talking about Skyteam, not Delta.

Precisely. I am not sure I know a reason Delta management wants Delta metal with a Delta pilot anymore than the numerous alternatives.

Which merger? WAL, PAA or NW. Kidding. Only SLC resembles the it's pre merger self. I don't think AMR dumped South America they got from PAA.

Many of those medium size European city pairs never made much money. Other routes like Amman, Cairo, and Moscow went away for obvious geopolitical reasons. Istanbul is gone due to not making money because of competition from Turkish Air.

In short, Delta has shifted from a poorly run airline to a well run pragmatic airline since bankruptcy and the merger.

I miss all those destinations. I like a PTIX of $6-8B a year.

Our AF partner flies 4 mainline flights a day from CDG-SVO and KLM flies 2 mainlines and Aeroflot does 3 including with a 330. Our Aeroflot partner flies more from AMS too. AF flies an A340 to Cairo. You're right about Turkish Air as they've absolutely flooded that market. Some of those markets have a LOT of capacity from our partners and with as large a travel market as the US is, it seems like some of those markets more than supports an ER's worth direct.

It would be interesting to see the total "team" ways to get to all the places we used to fly to as well as to see the number of pax to/from the US for those markets. Major spreadsheet ninja stuff there and I'm not going to do the grunt work but I'm sure its available. Obviously not all would be justified with international directs. Its also notable that if any could be supported by us direct but is instead funneled through partner hubs, its almost always less block hours that we then share for that market (US-CDG only etc) vs the more block hours we would have done ourselves (US-SVO etc) and then add up the totals.

It seems like the "re-kitting" on those routes to funnel through CDG/AMS is more of a win for AF/KML pilots than us. Obviously we wouldn't carry huge losses on some of those markets that wouldn't support a direct, however it seems like some of them would especially seasonally. Instead we split those shorter stage lengths with AF/KML (and maybe Alitalia on and off who knows) and then they get 100% of the additional block hours/ASKMs/etc to our former destinations.

Kind of makes it seem like we should get a greater than 50% deal versus the "half" that's always defined as the absolute rock bottom of the allowable floor in the nonexistant window becaue we'll never break through the top of that window anyway.

We dropped SVO because we were losing big money, much of it caused by fluctuations in the ruble. We would sell a ticket in the morning at what we thought was a profit and it would be a big loss in the afternoon.
We set a alltime record for transatlantic flights last summer. We will easily break the record this coming summer.

Moscow won’t come back until Russia leaves Crimea, stops supporting “rebels” in eastern Ukraine and sanctions are removed. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Seems like other markets would support an ER but I don’t know and do not have the data either. Sailing asserts that Delta makes more money on Delta metal and that seems correct. If we could make a decent yield we would be all over it. Seems more likely that Delta is moving Delta metal to make the most money.

The ruble has been fairly stable over the last 1-2 years. While its fluctuations may exceed the standard deviation of the USD/Euro, its not really an outlier compared to many other currencies our fares are priced to already. And fluctuation really doesn't mean much up and down its own average because for every time you lose on a short term downward fluctuation you by definition win on the next upcycle shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, our partners are making it work somehow and I bet there's still around an ER's worth of US-SVO pax a day and ditto for some (not all) of the other markets in question.

At the end of the day I agree its not about any particular destination. Its just frustrating to see supply and demand cited as reasoning for pulling service down yet our partners still move tons of metal and pax to those same destinations with a large share of US pax.

That seems like a pretty weak sanction then. Bad country! No! Get out of there! And if you don't, well, then, um, we'll force some of the people flying there to connect on our European (and even Russian) partners to our flag carriers instead of going direct! Ha! We showed you!

As far as Delta metal goes, while we may make more money all things equal, there is still the large issue of our partners sometimes irrational behavior like refusing to accomidate a economically justified US-direct flight by adjusting their marketshare capacity down a little vs doing it themselves with guaranteed more profitable (to them) feed. Kind of like when AF refused to pull down the logical and appropriate amount last theatre downturn so DL said "welp, we'll just pull down below our contractual floor cause AF is soverign and they call the shots!"

Yep, they go to better destinations. As far as making money, AirFrance 2018 net income was only 409M Euros, (double 2017’s).

With all the company hoopla about new intl service there was not one new destination in Europe or one new departure city from the US!

And better destinations is quite subjective. Air France only flies to 12 cities in the US. I wonder if somewhere in the suburbs of Paris an AF pilot is typing vigorously on a forum about how without Delta they could fly direct to Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Denver

Sent from my SM-G975U1 using Tapatalk

Oui, but there is a poster who goes by Septième Voyage, who is bragging about the expanded service to SVO, BUD, OTP, KBP, etc. They wouldn't have them without the Delta JV and those sweet ATL or DTW layovers.

So even though we don’t fly BOS to FCO right now, but we will next summer, it doesn’t count as new because those cities are already served by us, just using different city pairs?

Seems new to me.

And worse destinations. Anyone seen AF/KLMs footprint in Africa!? Yeah, they can keep those Rwanda layovers.

And anyone ever looked up what Air France pilots top out at? Just a quick search gave me approx €156,000 which is around $170,000. That's TOP END CAPTAIN. Less than most of our FOs make. Granted, it was just some quick and dirty searching but I'd love to be proven wrong on that.

So I guess in the end, drinking beer on the 24 hour company paid vacations in cool destination is neat and all... But if I have to chose, I'll take our pay rates and use my profit sharing check to pay for a meaningful vacation in places I WANT to go when I WANT to go there with people I WANT to be there with. In the meantime, I'll learn to love London/Paris/Amsterdam/Inchon/Shanghai/Beijing. That all assumes of course jobs/hours are protected.

But they get to give half of that to the government for free healthcare, college and social security. Sounds like a great deal to me. 😂

I give half to the government and don’t get any of that. It really does seem like a good deal 🤷🏽*♀️

Must be rough paying more than everyone else

They fly to 12 destinations in the US....How many do we fly to in France? Or add KLM, How many destinations do we fly to in France and the Netherlands?

I’ll give you a hint, it’s less than 4, but more than 2.

Not really a fair comparison when you consider that the United States has approximately four times the population spread over approximately 15 times the land area vs the Netherlands and France combined.:rolleyes:

Not to me we already fly to FCO and have int'l service frOm BOS!

Honestly I'd rather do 10 flights per day to Amsterdam than 8 individual flights to awesome international layover cities. I go to work to make money as efficiently as possible. I'll travel the world on my days off and go to places that I actually want to go. So I take any increase to our flying as a victory, even if the variety decreases!

And no, I don't wear New Balance sneakers. Nor do I have an affinity for Irish bars or Applebee's ;)

That way of thinking seems dangerously contemporary! Nevermind the increased total number of flights (albeit to hubs, yes), how do you expect the company to be profitable if we don't have layovers in Budapest or Sapporo!? ;)

Those were some seriously good layovers, especially 48 hours plus.

Preach Brother, Preach!

Well said

Sent from my SM-G975U1 using Tapatalk

Hey, how bout we make an DALPA advisorary board that the company has to inform prior to any new route expansion. This board would then have the power to review the proposed city layover and write an LOA to be voted on by us.....and if the layover doesn't meet our"dope" threshold....we nix it


Yea, that's the ticket:D

Sailing

In addition to those 330s and 350s, how many other deliveries are scheduled in 2020?

And 2021?

Thanks

Looks like in 2020 we have a net gain of 100 pilots by June 1st for summer flying.

Do we still have 88 different categories? This would be a net gain of 1.4 pilots per category?

How many additional aircraft by June 2020?

So with that perspective, you wouldn’t be happy if we increased BOS-FCO to 10 flights a day on Delta Metal just because “we already go there”.

Makes perfect sense.