Only you are magically increasing your costs 25% to draw this picture. Nobody ever proposed bringing arrjays to DAL @ 25% increase. Even if you increase the crew pay - which again nobody mentioned - the "synergies" from overhead in management/soc/office rendundancies would offset a significant portion of your self-imposed cost increase.

I already know that you can't write, but apparently you can't read either because I said nothing of being more profitable. I said that if Hulas can make money, you can too.

And there's less of them. Sunset provisions would be good but with the impending regional beat down well in the works, would you rather have 4/8/3/3 or RJs? You know as well I do that the company wouldn't have done both. That's why absorption will work better than sunsets.

Is 223 more than 153? Help me out with the math. ;)

Who are we absorbing? Sunset provisions are absolutely crucial.

Maybe we should have held out for better. :)

80 I am happy for them, really I am. In pattern bargening it is good to have carriers with higher rates to shoot at. I truly believe that was one of the issues we had against us in this last go around.

Now to be fair in less then 2 years our 777 rate will be 270 and at 3% a year by the time AA is at 310 we will be at 295. Now I am not advocating 3% a year in the next contract I am only use that to make the example that in 5 years the gap is not as big as you are showing.

I am one of those guys that you will not agree with, I think the wage structure has been reset thanks to 9-11 and the recession. I am not happy but I believe that is the new reality. I relate it to housing prices. At one time my house was 100k more valuable then it is now. I can hold out for the that value if I try and sell it but I am not going to be successful. I guess you can call it defeatist attitude maybe it is, but my belief is we need to work off each contract and improve it from the last one.

Ok so how much more does Delta pay their staff than a Regional? 25% is probably a good guess. Sure there's gonna be some redundancy savings, but what is there to operating an RJ besides labor and gas? Delta already pays for the gas, so the lowest labor cost is gonna drive the vendor selection.

Hulas can make money because he pays his people what his revenue dictates.

So your saying though that Delta could pay DAL crew rates and benefits and have them dispatched and maintained by DAL employees, and we'd break even on cost? Is that your assertion?

My expectations are a 30 year career worth $7.5 million with a stable quality of life. The airline industry will spend the rest of my career repaying the trauma from the first 6 years of it.

What's the difference, to a pilot, between the CRJ-200 and CRJ-900 other than length? I'm waiting.

So 348 to 125ish? 70 - 223 is an unreal number. Because its negative.

A) If outsourcing RJs is good for us then it must be good for Delta, and if it's good for Delta (obviously since they keep wanting to expand the outsourced jumbo RJ fleet) then why would they ever get rid of it?

B) We're not dismantling a 600 airplane fleet. We're removing 250 airplanes that EB said "customers don’t particularly prefer" and "the cost of continuing to keep the 50-seat RJs in the fleet but even more importantly the upcoming fairly significant maintenance costs that we’re going to be experiencing which will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars on that fleet if we had decided to retain that aircraft."

We are then adding back 70 jumbo RJs. So we're reducing 600 to 450, a 25% reduction. We are decreasing 50 seaters from 57% of the outsourced fleet to 27% and increasing the 50+ seat RJs from 42% of the outsourced fleet to 72%.

Put it this way, we helped them get rid of the outsourced airplanes they don't like for outsourced airplanes they love.

More importantly, we are increasing the 50+ seat jets by 70 more than the previous PWA allowed.

C) Rome was never outsourced.

I'd be willing to bet that given the synergies of eliminating completely redundant structures (particularly across the... 6 or so companies that we outsource to), the cost difference would be smaller than you think.

Those 50's were toast anyways... the company didn't want them and the customers hated them. So, instead of letting them die on the vine, we gave them more airplanes that are going to be around much longer.