everyone has the staffing now to cover their flying. Second thing is better product. Skywest has a different product, not better. Up until very recently United was using 50 seat jets like no tomorrow. In a few months they will want more 50 seaters when they have to park most of your large RJs due to scope.

Picking on Skypest is fun but not particularly helpful. The fact is (as you mentioned) United was planning almost 200 50 seaters based East of the Mississippi River at the beginning of the year. The only question was finding enough crews to fly them. Now Kirby says no 50 seaters will survive COVID-19. Logic seems to dictate the truth will be somewhere in the middle. But until we know it is hard to guess at the future of EV, C5 or ZW.

He’ll need scope concessions to get his wish granted. That genie is firmly bottled at the bottom of the sea.

I agree, there is a lot of unknown. If United gets their way in scope relief through court or the pilots expect Skywest to grow, if not expect them to get hit the hardest once the look back period forces significantly less large RJs. No one can predict the future but either way it will be interesting.

Does the look back period set a limit to large RJs? I can't find any sources for that other than RJ can be a max of 90% of NB flying (but no data on what the mix of large RJ to 50 seater has to be).

It doesn’t. The look back is UAX vs mainline NB flying. The large RJs are scopes out in terms of number of hulls but there is no provision for mix.

I assume that whatever departures UAX will do come fall is mostly large RJs and 50 seaters going away.

Yeah that's the crux of it. If they're going to be capped on total RJ flying due to reduced NB flying, will they want the 50's or the 70's?

If they won't have enough RJ's overall and something has to give, they'll want to cut service to smaller regional destinations, not larger regional destinations. Simple revenue math.

BK is the only help for that, no major pilot group that I can see has any appetite to grant relief on scope or much of anything else right now. I suspect UA (and the others) will try hard to stay out of BK for about one year if they can, to try to catch a possible economic rebound wave.

it’s going to be a total of 153 76 seaters and 50 seaters are limited at 90% of NB planes. Right now they have roughly 230 76/70 seaters and who knows how many 50 seaters. They will have to cut roughly 75 70/76 seater out which are currently flying. They have parked a whole bunch of 50 seaters but will still have scope room to pull thwm
back into service while being forced to park the larger ones. There is also a percentage cap of uax to Mainline NB which will be 120%. They may be able to cover that with just 70/76 seaters at the 153 cap but I doubt it. It’s all still fuzzy how it will play out

there is NO requirement to pull any 70/76 seaters. The only requirement affecting that fleet is to pull 6 seats from the 76 seaters if furloughs are going deeper at UA.

The only cap relative to mainline flying is on total UAX hulls. So they can pull either 50 seater or 70/76 seater.

my money is on UA keeping the large RJs

So how come before the pandemic 70-seaters were maxed out and 50-seaters weren’t? I don’t know the details of UA’s scope limits, but from my understanding there is a different limit for 76-seaters, 70-seaters, and 50-seaters, isn’t there?