Take a look at this - maybe it will help by setting up an exchange account.

Google Calendar and Iphone

 

I got it all squared away. Thanks for the link.

 

More Jan bids out this morning - if you're into that kind of frustration....

 

Hey, did anyone else notice on the investor slide show from yesterday that WestJet was on the slide with the global airline alliances? I thought they walked away from us too, after trying to steal them from SWA.

 

Thursday morning Delta put out a release touting additional first class seating. Most of it is stuff we've already been told - M9K goes to 16; M8K goes to 16; 76Q goes to 30...

But also listed is the 757-200 fleet going from 24 to 28!?!? Is anyone aware how they're going to pull that off? I figured 26 seats to make it equal with the 75X. Is this a typo? We'd have to remove forward galley space or slide back a restroom at 2R or remove the entire galley on the 757 at 2L and the entertainment rack at 2L on the 75X. And that's just the DL fleet, not talking about how you can take PMNW 75N's from 22 to 28...

 

Your opinion isn't divisive. The division was opened up with the RJDC lawsuit. Across the divide remained a few bridges, fragile as they were, but these were burned to a crisp with the Lawson hiring letter.

There are many good people at Comair, and I will always judge an individual on their own merits, but I think that as a group, they've made it impossible for us to work with them in any constructive manner.

 

It might be now, but it is still an asset we own. Why didn't we award our flying to our subsidiary and flip it?

If it is a write off (and it probably is) how much of our money did we destroy? Can't call it anything but lousy management.

 

Your perspective ... from their perspective they were bought, their code was taken, their merger request denied, their attempts at negotiating scope to protect their jobs refused, their flying was dispersed. Clearly they saw the divide as having happened at the 2000 ALPA Board of Director's meeting.

When they organized and started to fight back, that is when you noticed the division.

Not that I condoned the lawsuit or supported it, but I understood why they decided to fight back. From their perspective, they were happy at a rapidly growing, highly profitable, airline which was telling them DC9's were coming to fly under Comair code. Delta bought them, excluded them from "their" flying and trashed the place. While they certainly contributed to the battle damage, history has proven most of their worst fears were spot on accurate.

In Comair's salad days they had their own code, own tickets, or marketing. Certainly they were growing into markets Delta was leaving, but as far as they were concerned it was no different than Starbucks moving into where Dunkin Doughnuts had been. They developed a lot of their own routes.

My understanding was that part of the reason for buying Comair was to capture it's expansion and leverage it.

You and I know the history of other regional airlines who tried to make it on their own code. Atlantic Coast, MidWay, MidWest all died with pilots losing their jobs. Comair and ASA might have done the same, but that is historical conjecture. They know Delta bought them and blame Delta for their problems.

 

Now THAT is funny...and I DO fly Douglas equipment!

 

You can't call anything about the RJ plague except a failure by management... and us, for allowing it to exist. Billions and billions of dollars flushed (along with our jobs) down the toilet in an experiment to see if the basic premises of econmics and the laws of physics could be tampered with.

And of course, the theory is that we paid (dearly) for Comair because we couldn't control it well enough. And maybe all we gain was the right to kill it.

At the same time, I don't really see what the intrinsic value is. Since all regional carriers hide under our brand, they don't bring a brand. They don't bring anything, from management's standpoint, that another DCI carrier doesn't. Any assets they have that we want to keep, we don't have to sell. So I don't see any unique value that it brings. So when people say it's an asset, I'm not sure what they mean. It's an asset that would require a huge investment going forward, and an "asset" that offer an undifferentiated product at a greater cost. Why would a CEO get sentimental about it? They probably look at it in terms of an experiment in outsourcing, and since it wasn't particularly successful, they probably will shut it down at the lowest cost. No second-thought given, smoke-a-cigar-drink-a-cognac-and-go-to-bed-and-sleep-like-a-baby-like.

What's a little ominous in all of this, of course, is that you could fast-forward ten years, and substitute the words "Skyteam" for "Delta", and "Delta" for "DCI" or "Comair".

Which is precisely why we should have a NSL that allows us not to be whipsawed against our own, and VERY effective language in any JV agreements so that we can't be whipsawed from aborad either.