Don't worry George, they will probably figure it out just before you retire:D

They have it figured out. We are not competing with AS for a reason. No overlap, no......

One of our 74's sittin on the international ramp in IAH this morning???????????

Probably a charter. Most likely they are just keeping it there. It would really gum up the FBO ramps, plus they probably can't handle the weight anyway.

No overlap in the hopes that a merger willbe rubber stamped. I get that. But would that really be good for us? Conventional wisdom says airlines have to grow or shrink. Can a 14000 pilot airline really continue to grow? Although maybe we should do it now, before AK gets some insane connection agreement with bigger "RJ's" and we start hearing the arguement "well we have to give scope relief, because the jets are already ordered!"

While if we are growing and they are growing with little to no overlap, that should be self evident.

As we will be told , this is a company decision/function, not a union one. We allowed the code share and the liberal language. What they do with it is their choice.

Does it say anywhere in our contract that we cannot be released from SC any earlier then 10 hours in???

I beseech thee....LET ME FLY!

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses..

Let me go where AK, SWA and, yes, even UAL go...

Let me go North and South. Let me also know the joys of PDX, SEA, ANC and CUN...

I say, give me altitude and latitude, or give me death!

Cut Buzz. I hear ya. I used to love doing the LAX to Mexico and beyond flying. I too miss it. Heck I was looking at LAX prior to the pull down of our flying.

No doubt about that. And even if we didn't allow the code share, the company could still meet with us 5 minutes before the merger announcement for a "heads up" and do it anyway. I get that. I'm just wondering if it would be a good thing. Obviously everyone wants to grow into it by hiring on the bottom and intra-company growth. However I don't think anyone seriously thinks we will order 150 or so narrow body planes just to overfly every AK route ourselves (effectively doubling capacity on many).

And yes we are both growing now. But how long can that happen to an entity this size? I do like the combined routemap and it helps the Pacific stuff quite a bit. I'm sure the rationale in the negotiating room over the initial AK code share was that it will feed us (which it has) and we can therefore develop markets (which we are doing) and we can then grow into at least some ourselves later (and we're not seeing that). JB does BOS-SEA 2X and so does AK, yet DL can't? That should be where we inform AK we are taking one of them, since why else would we have built that palacial terminal just to get pwnd by an upstart on a permanant basis, and if they want to bleed out because of the added capacity then feel free not to reduce to one but be advised we don't have the gate space for the second one. The lost LA flying also needs to come back.

The whole point of code shares and JV's should be to help us now when there is no other way, and then to grow into and compete with the "partners" as able in the future. That's pretty much how we sweet talked in the first place for the anti trust concerns anyway. Not to be a permanant soft merger.