Slywest may have only been speaking for Skywest Airlines. Not Skywest and ExpressJet. Unless I misread the article, the ExpressJet name was noticeably absent.

 

and

Yes, really: incentivize. On the pilot cost side of the equation, (and I'm sure they look at this in purchasing decisions... remember the 3B6 777 tug-of-war?), LBP incentivizes getting big airplanes, since there is no penalty in terms of added pilot costs. LBP obviously ties pilot pay to airframes, so the bigger the airframe, the lower the pilot cost per seat. On the flip-side of this, the smaller the airplane, the greater the pilot cost per seat. The incentive is for bigger airplanes.

Hell, the incentive is always towards bigger airplanes, as even the productivity system doesn't capture the value of every incremental seat (a 747 doens't pay twice as much as a 757). But LBP ties pilot costs to airframes, and the producticity system ties it more to seats. That's not value judgment on my part, I think it's a simple statement of facts.

As we add seats, we want more pilot money. We have an incentive to ask for this, the company has an incentive to ask for the opposite. The two major beneficiaries to LBP are the company, and senior pilots that don't like what their seniority is buying them right now, and want to downgrade equipment for better in category seniority, without taking a paycut.

The current sytem isn't flawed T, the problem is that it's incompatible with your wishes. The guy one junior to you that's flying the M88 made a sacrfice in pay, and some other areas, but he's senior. He doesn't want your flying, or he'd bid for it, and he doesn't deserve to have you show up in his category under a LBP sytsem. He's already done what you don't want to do, and made compromises on how to leverage his seniority.

So you're approaching the problem backwards, and asking how we might make the system conform to your wishes. The problem you're running into is that the productivity system is better, and provides more money to the group as a whole. There is no logical argument for LBP that works for the average pilot, only certain senior pilots that might benefit. You simply took a wrong turn when you decided, somewhere, that there is no reason you couldn't fly a 737 in a simpler base, for the same money, since you're senior.

But there is a reason, and it's an obstacle in your way: the productivity system is better. You just can't see it, partly because I think you're a good guy, and you're sincere in your motivations, but what you're advocating is 100% wrong for the group, and amounts to pulling up the ladder. I'm not accusing you of doing this consciously, or with malice. I'm just pointing out why you're banging your head on this, and failing to convince some of us on LBP: your QOL desires are understandeable, but the LBP system you require to make them a reality is a poor system.

 

I cut and pasted below the pertinent paragraph from the article BB posted.

"SkyWest subsidiaries SkyWest Airlines and ExpressJet operate about 90 and 60 Bombardier CRJ200 aircraft , respectively, for Delta, under 15-year contracts that Kraupp says do not expire until 2020. Kraupp is emphatic that Delta does not have any rights in the current contract to tell SkyWest to cease the 50-seater operations before the agreements expire."

Denny

 

The 150 they operate is 25 more than the end state 125, so with the 61-70 new metric to gain 76's, they have to retire 4.6 50's per 76. (short roughly 5 airframes).

The company could only go to 218 76's if JA plays hardball.

Interesting..... But it could be JA just posturing publicly while knowing behind the scenes they will make the trades. Later SKYW will come out and say how through negotiations they were able to "improve the magins" over their current fleeting and provide "better returns for the shareholders and for a longer time period" while the plan was the same all along.

 

I guess it depends on how you define 'bigger'.

I see 737's replacing 757's and 767's (Domestic routes)

I see 787's eventually replacing 767ER's (a wash, size wise?) but maybe replacing 777's in 10 years, and 747's maybe sooner than that. The last I heard, the 787 is about the size of a 767ER, not the size of a 777 or 747.

I see the 717's as our only 'growth' airplane. Do we call that bigger? It is bigger than a 50 or 76 seat RJ, no doubt, but it's the smallest 'manline' airframe out there.

I don't see that as bigger, just more small narrow body flying with the 737's ((-900) and 717's.

I don't see Bigger coming any time soon, until we order and take delivery of something as big as the 777-300 and 747, I'm not holding my breath waiting for those. In the mean time, we will have pilots displaced off the 767/757 to the 737-900.

 

There has been some rumblings of some announcement early next year that does not include DAL. No idea what it is, but have been hearing that JA may be ready to move on his stand alone plan. Time will tell I guess.

 

Guess they're ready to burn through that cash.

 

Ah yes, another regional CEO with stand alone plan. I can see no way how this well thought out plan could possibly fail.

 

Let's not confuse the short-term, and the long-term trend. As I said, maybe this airline went counter-evolutionary for a while (and it just about killed us), but as a whole, you look at the industry over time, and we've definitely gone bigger, and bigger.

But in either case, 737-900's replacing 757's is not a loss in seats (weird, I agree). We can both remember a time when a 737 was just a little plane to fit below the 727 in the fleet, but a 737-900 vs. a 757 is actually a slight increase in seats, I believe. Vs. a 767-300 it's a loss, vs. an A320, it's a gain.

717's replacing 50-seat RJ's is a gain, although some of them replace DC-9 50's. A loss of seats, but not a loss of pay.

At ay rate, I'm not trying to sell a rosy picture on Delta's future fleet decisions (no idea what they will buy), I'm only looking at what mechanisms we have in our contract to capture revenue, and what the language encourages or discourages. The current system captures some of the revenue from added seats, an LBP sytem doesn't. I think a system that makes pilot cost a constant per seat is naturally better than one that makes it a constant per airframe. And I note the industry has moved, over time, towards bigger and bigger airplanes. It's a confluence of physics, logic, and economics that drive this. They want more butts per flight, and we want to be paid for each of those butts. I'll make exceptions for some of the really nice tushies, the likes of which you see when you offload a sorority charter in Punta Cana before a 36-hour layover.

 

SkyWest never stood a chance to benefit from the new TA. That was obvious from the beginning when Delta extended the 140 CRJ-200s at Pinnacle.

With about 150 jets at the various SkyWest operations there simply aren't enough 76-seaters to go around and make the 3-for1 RJ swap financially interesting to SkyWest.

Word is all of the SkyWest 50-seaters will move from DCI to USAir...

The SkyWest MRJs will need 80ish seats to be cost effective (capital cost). With CRJ900s leased by Delta there is no financial incentive for SkyWest to purchase MRJs other than for flying them for another carrier.

Most likely Skywest MRJs will enter feed service for American (then merged with USAirways)
With more than 76-seats, the first MRJ delivered to SkyWest will also cause SkyWest to cease operations for DCI, because of the Section 1 limitations on 76-seat jets.

The elimination of the 150 or so 50-seaters at SkyWest will help create more favorable 50-for-76-seater exchange ratios for the other DCI carriers providing the incentive for breaking existing contracts.

SkyWest wins because they get to go after a new lucrative Jumbo RJ contract at American...

Pinnacle will remain the sole 50-seat jet operator for DCI...

Eagle will most likely be hurt by all of this...

YMMV

Cheers
George