Dubya Tee Ephhhh

 

I'm not a big fan, I'd prefer it stay in the "war chest", we WILL need one again, maybe very soon.

When we need to rebuild the SMRA "war chest" then all of a sudden the "ALPA is taking more of my money" complaining will start up and be really annoying.

 

If the 717s are all growth, and we better all hope they are all growth, why then strike the mainline fleet size requirements to grow the 76-seat fleet from section 1? I mean if it's going to be all growth anyways just leave the mainline fleet size requirements. You could drop the 3:1 language and just replace it with the tables tieing 76 seat fleet growth to the 717s.

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fwiw, I ran across this again from the same email from 2 months ago: if the early out under performs with say around 100 pilots taking it (and all things being equal) then hiring in spring 2014. if 250-300 pilots take it then we should be able to hire in summer or fall 2013.

Of course, that's assuming things don't drastically change in the direction and size of the company through a merger.

 

Or the many hundreds of domestic narrowbody capacity groth aircraft coming on line in the coming years from the so called LCC's and start ups. JB alone is planning on a stunning 50% increase in their already dominant BOS presence and DL's answer is to allow UAL into terminal A to make room for it because the alternative would be to actually use the gates to full capacity and we can't do that. Then there's the dual subsidized foreign EGO airlines that will dump super premium widebodies into just about every large US city simply because they over ordered and have no place to put them.

Will DL keep culling capacity to fund all of that, or will DL eventually respond by competiting ruthlessly even if it means a reduction in Q over Q paper numbers for a while?

 

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Good grief. Why anybody does ALPA work is beyond me, but I thank them for it.

 

If Delta had JB CASM we would be growing rapidly. We don't have JB CASM

 

And we will have neither for quite a while. That said, people will still fly, and even if less, we have to figure out how to compete and win instead of funding fantasy capacity growth for ponzi scheme airlines in permanent growth mode.

 

[QUOTE=forgot to bid;1245997]If the 717s are all growth, and we better all hope they are all growth, why then strike the mainline fleet size requirements to grow the 76-seat fleet from section 1? I mean if it's going to be all growth anyways just leave the mainline fleet size requirements. You could drop the 3:1 language and just replace it with the tables tieing 76 seat fleet growth to the 717s.

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We replaced it with a block hour ratio. Had we kept the fleet number instead it would have been very simply with the number of aircraft coming for the company to pump and dump the mainline fleet. They would then have also had access to a greater number of 76 seaters.

 

Your right, The 717's are very bad for the mainline. We should give them back to improve things.

 

Keep in mind the outsourced lift, in addition to being preferred by the company and magically "debt free" is in the form of iron clad long term deals with trillion dollar penalties for breaking, while mainline lift is extremely fungible in comparison. If more capacity cuts are decided on, they will have to come out of mainline because that's how its set up. As some have pointed out, there is plenty of flex within the MBR for domestic and the insane 3 year no floor/quick snapshot AF/KLM JV. We are the shock absorbers, now more than ever.

And then there's mergers. Except Hawaiian, which would pretty much be a plug and play, anything else could equate to significant DL reductions, in some cases right after a very unfavorable relative integration of the whole with subsequent cuts disproportionately effecting the new PMDL side.