You don't really lock in a price per se, you trade heating oil futures, and when the price goes up, the gains offset the increased costs. Personally, I think hedging is straight gambling, and foolish, especially since the trading partners on Wall Street are extremely corrupt.

Delta is better off investing its cash resources in the employees, as well as flight equipment, and facilities.

But as sailing said if they make the money up on increased profits then fuel costs become less volatile, more predictable and their goal of taking fluctuations in costs becomes attainable.

Or we are screwed. If we are, let's find a scape goat.



I said goat.

Remember even if it goes down $20 we’re still looking at $100 a barrel when we talk about refining costs, taxes, movement of the crew and movement of jet fuel into airport.

I like a good populist answer but if prices go up and you just spent a bunch of money on people and equipment, and your competitors didn't, you're screwed as are your employees. Best thing is to kill cost fluctuations.

That's the scary part. How big is our future exposure? I agree with Mesabah. It's basically riverboat gambling, and our hedging operation over there on Virginia Avenue has had some pretty bad luck in the past.

Any drop in oil prices is obviously going to be a net gain. I just hope the commodity market losses don't eat up too much of that gain.

You don't have to hedge on heating oil when you own a refinery. You can hedge crude which has a much larger market.

The lower the price of crude, the more sense it makes to lock it in long term as there is more upside potential than downside. One only has to go back and look at swa when they were able fix their costs for many years.

If gas drops to $2 a gallon, I would consider locking in that price for the next couple
Of years if it were easy for the average consumer. Yeah, it could go to a buck and I lose, but it more likely to go back to $4...


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A few seniority facts for the junior folks.

According to my math we had 241 retirements for 2014 based on the Dec seniority list.

I think we had less than 100 mandatory retirements scheduled.

2015 has 146 mandatory retirements scheduled.

At the start of 2014 I had 1099 guys/gals junior to me on the list
At the start of 2015 I will have 2037 guys/gals junior to me.
That is 938 numbers added to the list for the year.

12,316 total pilots on the list.
12,430 total pilots on the day of the SLI Dec 2008

January classes should put us back over the total number of pilots we had the date of the SLI.

Not a bad year for seniority movement at Delter.

Were the 55 early outs removed from the Dec seniority list? Seems like I moved up a lot of #'s, more than usual.

The early outs don't start going for the most part until 1 JAN. There should be around 20 that date. The rest are spaced out for a bit. We are starting to see a return to more normal attrition rates. Over double the number of pilots left in 14 then straight age 65.

This is when the Vacation Moveups are processed. That usually takes a couple of days at the very beginning of the month. (I should know...I was trying to get my Feb vacation moved to January via the moveup process, but no luck. Oh well.)

It is also when the CQ bidding is processed, by the way. Add those two items together and usually PBS is not available for a couple of days at the very beginning of the month.

I'm not trying to be humorous.

It seemed at least once a week this year we would get news of a pilot passing away. That could be some of the additional movement this year.

Anyone know if these folks passing are on sick leave, freak accidents, or just keeling over?

I've seen a lot of stuff that indicates that even a healthy person that works out can be overcome by too much sedentary time.

Is this job killing is?