I thought they were to ditch the Asian hub concept and overfly Narita to places like BKK and such. However, that does appear to be changing with the China Eastern and Korean deals that are in the works.

Feb seniority list is out. 38 retirements which is the largest monthly number of retirements in the last 10 years other than months where buyouts were offered. Love it....hopefully those 38 guys live healthy and happy for at least 20 more years.

I know you're connected at the hip with Ed, but weren't we told these were 747 replacement aircraft for Pacific routes.

The first 7. The point of the order was a aircraft that could go from the Eastern US to Shanghai. This was discussed at the roadshows. They invisioned Shanghai as operating much like AMS with as many as 15 Delta flights a day. It takes a lot of aircraft to do that because of the length of the flights. Others on the forum here were posting this information a long time ago. The company even purchased a chunk of CHina Eastern to facilitate this. With the political situation in China and talk of combining many of their airlines under government edict I suspect the whole plan may be going the way of the Taiwan hub.
It's interesting it's no longer mentioned by the company but KAL seems to be much more in the news.
Here is a pretty good summation of our Pacific situation however slightly dated.
https://runwaygirlnetwork.com/2016/0...as-narita-hub/
Here is another good article about plans for Shanghai.
http://www.experiencetheskies.com/ho...-shanghai-hub/

Delta Air Lines (DL) Chief Executive Officer Richard Anderson said he sees the Atlanta based airline to build an international hub at Shanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG) and expand its budding relationship with China Eastern Airlines Corp. (MU).

“When you think about what our strategy is long-term, we need to have a hub in Shanghai like the one we have in Amsterdam,” Anderson told employees in a recorded message.

For the last 2.5 years we have averaged losing one pilot per day. That number will increase to 3/day in a few years and it looks like it will be accelerating nicely now.

We're already adding Seoul flights, and Ed has been in meetings with KAL. China access is the goal, but it's looking like a China hub is less likely. That may turn out alright. It's sad to see the NRT hub dismantled. However, the Fukushima situation is worsening. Record levels of radiation, still contained, are being detected. Like 9 times the previous record. That's not a good trend, and there is no plan or current technology to address the situation. Hopefully they'll get it worked out, but nobody really knows what's going to happen there.

I think the goal was to for example not just have one daily dtw-pvg or atl-pvg flight; but to have 2-3 per day connecting people to both countries. Probably one of our planes and one of theirs flying between the hubs
It's probably really hard from managements standpoint to predict the future in a constantly changing international environment so hopefully they can grow using both icn and pvg and we can keep all of these 25 coming

The problem is Seoul does not give us access to the Chinese population. That's a huge loss. Seoul would not require the A350, other cheaper options could be used.
I suspect that uncertainty with the airline situation in China is a big part of the holdup.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...three-airlines

It's also a possibility that this is all due to a 4 month delay from airbus!

It's a good question for the investor call.