Quote:
Originally Posted by Bucking Bar
We did.
As details start to come out about how Pinnacle will become mainline, early plans sure sound like an alter ego. Since they sit at the table with Delta, with ALPA's blessing, we are going to have to deal with that in 2015 (just as Anderson started to say).
I don't want to minimize the potential threats (present and future) of outsourcing at the DCI level, and I appreciate you shining the flashlight under the sofa on this one as consistently as you do.
That said, even when force multiplied by my inner cynic, I'm not seeing the potential conspiracy theory on this being able to play out unless we give up a lot more than we have.
Reading the part of the transcript in question where RA is all giddy about PCL, I think it was because he took an already super cheap "airline" in an already super cheap sector and made them cheaper. That's not exactly first man on the moon stuff though, all things considering. Not only could anyone have done it, it was inevitable regardless. And we're not done yet. Just look at Skywest, the current king of kings. With their 2015 cost reset coming up, Pinnacle just might never see the end of their 7 year contract without an "adjustment".
That's how it all works of course. We all turn to the tables in Section 3 and look at what we will make today and follow it up to the future. Yet in the regionals especially it never gets to the future, and if it does you are automatically uncompetitive. Longevity is the built in cost creep killer that can crush your competitive block hour bidding with the never ending barrage of RFP's for all flying, growth and current. You could have the cheapest contract in the world, but once a lot of guys get senior, someone else can underbid you and they'll be happy to do it because they think the upper left quadrant of their pay tables will take the sting out of it one day.
So PCL just ate a pretty large cost reset, is shedding higher cost planes for lower cost planes and has some degree of built in longevity resetting too because of the flows that aren't really flows because they have to interview but they're still kinda flows because inevitably a ton will flow.
As for Delta "controlling the product" I think he was just robotically repeating what every airline manager has been repeating ever since the first outsourced turboprop got painted in mainline colors. So what though. Really. DL created a VP position to make DCI "just like mainline" years ago. Heck ACJet (remember them?) FA's wore the DL uniform. There is nothing revolutionary, paradigm changing or new world order creating going on here that hasn't been around for decades other than the flow. Just a garden variety cost reset at yet another regional in the churn. Soon someone else will be cheaper and the process will continue.
That sucks, and I don't support it, but its a far cry from flying 100+ pax to South America in DL uniforms unless we give up a lot more than we've given up. I just don't see anything new here at all.