Not only for sale, for sale at pennies on the dollar:

Owner of Big West refinery confirms Alon as sole bidder - Bakersfield.com

BTW the previous owner bought the refinery from Shell (who were going to close it) and made big upgrades to the refinery.

The oil fields around that refinery account for 10% of the domestic us produc tion.

Don't believe the "poor oil industry line"

Cheers
George

 

Well, then lets start buyin' em. Maybe we can get Delta to put diesel fuel pumps in the employee lots so we can fill up for employee prices. Then I can sell my Civic airport car and start driving a 3/4 ton diesel to work again.

 

You know, this works for Warren Buffet and his Netjets. He bought his whole supply chain, he owns FlightSafety and Signature and probably the insurance company. When I was doing corporate flying I'd get the netjets signature discount on insurance which put our rate around $50,000/yr for a $24M airplane which I believe was about a 1/3 of the normal price.

But more importantly was that discount on fuel because it was tremendous. They're overpriced but still, I think if the fuel price was in the high $6 dollar range I was paying in the high mid 3s or low 4s. Worse case maybe $5. But hey, buy a 1000-2200 gallons and save a $1/gal was well worth it.

Still, we owned our own fuel farm which again shows the value in owning your supply chain because instead of $5-$6+ a gallon I was paying in the mid to high $2s. So as long as you know what you are doing. Anybody ever ran a fuel farm? It's about as fun as dealing with this %@#$@# thing:



He he he, you said "win".

So, we're not hiring, but we know when we do we can't push people through fast enough. Hmmm.

When I had recurrent the other day I went down to the training center a little early and played in the CAPT trainer. I may have been the only person in the building, albeit a sunday, but it was dead except for the actual sims, they were a little busy but I saw a lot of them with the bridges connected and doors opened and nobody around.

Maybe shorten training up a bit? Just a thought. Don't kill the messenger. And if people were the issue well, you've got pilots willing to be SLIs. I think I heard for 3 MD88 SLI positions there was 300-400 applicants last year? On ATL M88 B if you do a day trip and get a raw score of 10-11 at the beginning of the month you might not fly again until the end of the month.

BTW, how did you dirty dogs up there in MSP do your SLI's? Wasn't it a requirement 1 month on the line and 1 month in the sim? Not perpetual sim with say 3 months on the line as DAL does? Or obviously heavily DGS?

 

Something to break up the monotony:

YouTube - Seaboard World DC-8 lands at Marble Mountain Vietnam.m4v

 

I was thinking it was Yer Man's in the "Garden"

 

How is it that we can only train 600 pilots a year? When I was hired in 2000 we were hiring 60 a month and now we've got NWA's training center also.

 

Only reporting what we were told. Remember, after the -9's are gone,there will only be 320, 757 and wide body sims in MSP.

 

Heck in 2008 they went to classes of 50 pilots i believe every 2 weeks?

 

I also wonder this... DL used to routinely train 100 pilots a month.

Combined that should equal a capacity for 160 noobs a month on top of normal movements and recurrents.

 

I have no clue.