Interesting research on cat ranchers:



More here:http://epictimes.com/gallery/326819/...ing-toothpaste

 

Good find! I like the Apple religious extremism one, haha.

 

From today's Earnings Call. Overall very positive but with some interesting points from the pilot perspective.

As TSquare would say, good thing bigger pays better And don't count on any new aircraft from the widebody RFP until they are on the ramp with a Widget on the tail Good news on Trainer though.

David E. Fintzen – Barclays Capital, Inc.

Hey, good morning everyone. Just a question, kind of I guess on the wide RFP, but more conceptual. You’ve obviously gotten a lot of CASM benefit with the regional up-gauging and the domestic up-gauging. Are there similar long-term opportunities in international to move towards bigger airplanes or is that a market that’s more fragmented and you actually end up moving down in aircraft size? Just kind of curious how that plays through CASM over the next many years?

Edward H. Bastian

Talking about the causes – this is Ed, David; I don’t know that there’s a huge up-gauge strategy on the international. Certainly there’s a big CASM benefit as we look at the fuel efficiency of the new aircraft. We do operate a large fleet of 747s. So we would expect those would be candidates for replacement in this next cycle. If anything, we’d be down-gauging a bit there, but certainly picking up a very nice CASM return, probably thinking somewhere in the orders of 20% to 25% more fuel efficiency on the new aircraft.


John D. Godyn – Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC

Okay. Fair enough. I was hoping the team could also elaborate a bit on the aircraft RFP. There were some comments, I think, in the press about a hopeful outlook on the A330 NEO. On the other hand of course the team is very ROIC focused, and I guess there is a third component to that how it relates to the long-term CapEx guidance that you’ve all spoken to.

Richard H. Anderson

Well, we are just testing the market and it will be a pretty long process to see whether there is anything that makes sense from an ROIC standpoint, and the number could be, it could be a lot less than the number that we’ve talked about there. It just depends on what happens when we get the RFP responses back. And what we’ve said in our long-term guidance, it remains unchanged. We’re finished with all the flat-bed mods and you saw this year we’re down at – we’re at a number of about $2.3 billion in CapEx. So, we’re going to continue to make certain that whatever investments we do make are consistent with what you’ve seen us do in terms of return on invested capital and returning capital to shareholders.



Savanthi Syth – Raymond James & Associates, Inc.

But just a follow-up question on the refinery, has the upgrade work been completed, and is expectation still that it will be somewhat profitable in the second quarter and maybe profitable in the year?

Paul A. Jacobson

Good morning, Savi. This is Paul. The upgraded work has been completed. We have been producing approximately 50% distillate products throughout the month of March. We do expect that we will be profitable in the June quarter.

 

 

Helane R. Becker – Cowen and Company, LLC
Okay. Thank you. And then just on the new pilot rules that went into effect in early January. Can you just talk about where the cost associated from that would be and whether or not – and how you’re able to handle that successfully?
Richard H. Anderson
We’ve been able to handle it from an operating perspective incredibly successfully, and Jill how many perfect completion factor days do we have?
Paul A. Jacobson
We’ve got 24 year-to-date.
Richard H. Anderson
We have 24 perfect completion factor days year-to-date. And we’ve been able to manage through that actually quite effectively because the way our pilot agreement was already set up, we had a fair amount of flexibility in terms of being able to manage to the new rules and we put a lot of work into our systems and our planning in advance of 117. In fact, we asked the FAA to let us start a little bit early so that we could have it for the full month of January for the purposes of planning. So you see it or not, we don’t break out separately that kind of detail in our non-fuel CASM, but you can see overall our non-fuel CASM in the quarter was excellent.
Glen W. Hauenstein
I would just also add that practically our operational control center manages that on a daily basis to mitigate the impact.

 

Is that what they do just before they play...

Hiding Mickey?

 

Here's some quick math to keep you up late...

A Billion dollars is a thousand Million dollars. When the company flushed our DB plan (with DALPA's blessing) to the PBGC, the Delta (south) DB plan was about 4 Billion 'underfunded', because Delta hadn't made -any- contributions to the plan during the Dot Com stock market boom.

With last year's 2.7 Billion, and this year's 3.7 Billion earnings forecast, the company could have put $4 Billion (4,000 Million) into our DC plans to make us nearly whole, to replace our DB plan, and still had "Record Earnings" in each year ($1.7 Billion in each year, while putting $4 Billion into our retirement plans).

Yeah, most of that money Delta is "Earning" is actually due to the PILOT contributions, through the loss of our DB plans and our pay cuts.

My 42% pay cut alone has been about $100,000 per year, for 10 years, which is $1 Million, PLUS my DB plan was worth $1.4 Million, 10 years ago. And there are at least another 1000 guys in my situation.

So put me down for a $2.4 Million contribution over the past 10 years, times 1000 others, we paid for the first $2.4 Billion of Delta's record earnings, but at least I'll get $4,000/mo. from the PBGC when I retire...so I've got that going for me.

Not even a thank you note from Richard...who, bye the way, got a 42% raise last year.

 

Until we ask for some, if not all of it back, is it any surprise that they're making these profits? We work, others profit. My W2 is no higher than it was 3 years ago. In my case, it really was a cost neutral contract. Can't wait to get that nifty tablet though. The whole "it's a short term contract" looks like it'll bite us too, what incentive do they have to even negotiate? We can't even stand up to a contract by memo abrogation. Nothing I've seen lately that says we'll go and get it this go around... DALPA is all about pointing at new captain jobs... as if they weren't coming anyway and they had anything to do with it. Oh yeah, we had to sign or the 717's weren't coming... whatever. Would have been 319's then.

 

An all-pilots bulletin here, a stalled negotiation there...hey, that whole contract is pretty darn flexible!

 

All of the above!