"Capacity discipline is our leverage (and our way of dealing with the upcoming wave of retirements.)"

We can shrink by 2% a year and hire zero pilots until 2018-2020. That should really keep our costs down, and we will continue to make record profits.

We are actually shrinking at four times that rate.

I expect 2013 to turn around. If it doesn't then we are very overstaffed.

Actually, the message I got out of the last quarterly webcast is that our unit costs are going up as a result of capacity discipline and a worforce that is both older AND has more longevity (it has to be that way). This time around, I didn't hear the "capacity discipline, capacity displine, capacity discipline" mantra as clearly as in quarters past. I heard upgauging was the key to lower unit costs.

Not that I'm holding my breath.

Yeah, it's all over the news. Going to be a huge mess!

I'm not holding my breath either... but I am hopeful that up-gauging is in the 2010s what RJs were to the 2000s.

So, we have two shades of blue now.

Pan Am blue & and post 1986 Northwest/Republic blue.

See why I didn't want to know. :)

I find this ridiculously off, American a more happy place than Alaska or JetBlue?:
The Happiest Airlines For Holiday Travel - Forbes

Shirley by that you mean upgauging would be "all the rage", not "the horrific counter-evolutionary move that crushed our airlines, and introduced the C, D, E, and painful F-scales to thousands of aspiring pilots", or "the plague of outsourcers and outsourcees alike".

that's a definite maybe.