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!"