OK, so does that mean that the SLC base is shrinking? I had assumed the MSP 320 displacement would be as big as the MD90 category currently in SLC. Am I missing something?

 

George, my friend me too
The reason I voted against the JPWA
and wrote here so, How you?

A little early morning Haiku

 

Actually our pilots costs are about 1/2 of theirs. About 6 dollars an hr versus 3.85 an hr per seat.

Their overall costs are lower than ours for one reason. Debt. They are not paying the interest payments we are not by a long shot. That adds somewhere between a billion to two billion to our costs per year that they do not have. When our management teams is telling us they want to pay down debt, that is good, real good, because if we can do that we can get paid a lot more, and we will be able to truly compete with WN and beat them at their own game.

WN can pay cash for AS and pay the poison pill a we pay a bar tab. We reduce our debt burden and we will do very well going forward.

 

Trust me I am not a fan of the AS code share agreement. RA is correct it gives them all the benefits of ownership without all of the cost. Great for them, bad for any pilot that wants a career on the west coast. It is one more band aid we have pulled out of the box. It will need to be replaced or lose its effectiveness.

How ever we do it, we need to fly our West Coast ops our self.

 

How much debt has Delta paid off? How much debt are we financing?

I know you posted the balance sheets a while back, but I'm a financial idiot. I need it dumbed down to bubba speak.

 

Yes, but it's "One Place....Some Place....."

 

Or 20 DC9's we don't even have to buy, just maintain, or 10 MD90's.....

 

We won't know until the AE comes out but that's not the way I understood it. There's just going to be more narrow body flying system wide, which I assume is going to be through an increase in block hours.

Instead of doing a 1 for 1 displacement between SLC and MSP, the staffing for the SLC 320 will mostly come from this increased flying. There was nothing said that would indicate SLC was shrinking.

Another way of looking at this is that even with the arrival of the M90 into MSP, there's still going to be enough MSP 320 flying that they're not displacing a 320 crew for every M90. Barry said that there will be some 320 displacement to SLC, but not a whole lot.

I guess it makes sense for the company to do it that way, since most of the SLC 320 slots will be open to anyone in the system and will be filled by AE instead of an MD, thereby saving moving costs.

 

What we paid off is relative as we just refinanced 2.5 billion of the NWA debt. We still have more debt than cash.

Off the top of my head which may be wrong we are in the 8-10 billion in debt range. It will be updated in the 8K and 10K which I have not had time to look at this week!

Anyone else getting posts nuked left and right with this server issue they seem to be having?

 

I agree that SLC is not shrinking. I see them toying with WN a little more with this one!