That's probably what Spirit thought in 2022 or so.

You DO realize regionals:

a). do NOT sell their own tickets and are paid for (subsidized) by legacy
b). have been going out of business for YEARS. Ask any former XpressJet, Comair, Great Lakes, Chatauqua, (and about 50-75 more) . . . member

And, the regionals that have survived, whether wholly owned or not, FO PAY is pretty much commensurate w/ F9 now. It's an actual tough decision for a FO to leave a regional w/ a flow over going to F9.

Read up on SWA - started out point to point in TX only (and had to overcome the Wright Amendment). Paid about 40% less than everyone else. Flew one type of aircraft. Sound familiar? Look at them today. Highest paid in the industry. Award winning customer service and credit card plan. Not the same as it was about 10 years ago (no airline is) but has never had a non-profitable year until COVID. They taxi fast, 2 engine and start the APU on every landing. It can be done if you MANAGE correctly.

Almost your entire post is irrelevant.

So far, it's true. The divergence is where Spirit took on more debt & rapidly increasing costs, whereas F9 has so far managed the costs reasonably well. While it's certainly possible a bankruptcy could be in F9's future, I'd bet money on them existing in 5 years, whereas Spirit is dead today.

If you have more to add to the convo, rather than just providing some useless fear-inducing driveby, please do share why the two are remotely comparable.

We are managed differently, and I will be the first to say not correctly.

Single engine taxi does not equal taxi slow, and it's a waste of gas to taxi slow if there is no traffic in front of you. If it's a Classic it may be equal money for fast taxi but NEO makes plenty of thrust to SE taxi fast for about 400 lbs/hr less a than 2 engine taxi, and only while you have the power increased to accelerate.

APU on landing is not how we are managed here. They have decided that it is worth the money to have a ramp agent spend his time hooking up power. while sitting at the gate waiting for power it takes 8 minutes of SE burn time to equal our per start cost on the APU.

I get that a lot of the cost is because the executives are missing low hanging fruit, but managing the operation of the airline is not your's or my job. operating the flight efficiently is. That is literally the only influence we have on whether we are here if these fuel prices stay up for an extended time, the rest is up to the corporate types.

Agreed. But my point was (as I think you already understand) that if you're managed correctly, small cost savings like taxi time and extra APU usage, is barely noticeable. I don't know the #s but I'd be surprised if we didn't have at least 3-5% of our flights hold longer than 8 minutes either waiting on a gate or waiting for external power. The KEY to reducing costs lies in a better network, better under wing services and better overall operational management.

What the pilots can affect is so minimal, it's hardly worth mentioning.

Minimal impact on a minimal margin is a lot larger than you might think.

$53 million profit last quarter, saving 400lbs a flight would have boosted that up at least another $5 million at the gas prices we had then. That's about a 10% impact on profit.

They are messing up a lot of things up by themselves. If I don't have a gate agent within 90 seconds I crank the APU. Almost every single time if I had left the engine running it would have been a 10 minute or more wait before I got power. That's on them. Having a mechanic wait on the phone for MCC to answer for 30 minutes, 100% on them. Gate availability is all theirs. About 2 dozen other stupid things you see nearly every single work day that is all on them and would be easy fixes.

frustratingly stupid revenue leakage, but it is what it is.

I absolutely refuse to sit at a gate with an engine running for any period of time as long as I have an operable APU. Ain’t gonna happen. It is not safe, especially given the egregious lack of experience that we have working below wing. I don’t care how much it costs to start the thing — it’s simply not worth someone’s life.

Thank you. I start the APU 2 minutes after landing, single engine 3 after landing. As soon as the parking brake is on both engines are off. To me it’s a safety issue, period. And I am willing to bet I use less fuel than sitting at the gate for 5 min waiting to get plugged in.

If you're doing single engine taxi out you're expecting to have a long taxi, so there's no point comparing SE taxi out with saving taxi time, on top of that you're not only saving fuel, if you manage properly it's less breaking as well.
About the APU it's nit only about fuel, it's about cycles. If you start it then shut down when they connect the external power then your start again later, it's two start cycles not only one, more wear and tear. I known that seems all peanuts but It all ads up to millions when you consider hundreds of flights a day.

Normal taxi times are about 12 minutes for both takeoff and landing. Let's use 15 mins for an example. Each engine burns approx 600 lbs / hr at idle and requires a 3 minute cool down (or 3-5 minute warm up). So, that's 12 minutes of SE taxi (saving 240 lbs of fuel) or about half of what you're claiming. Yes it helps but fuel used for taxi is about 1% of the total consumed so it just doesn't add up to that much as compared to other things. TBH, if we REALLY wanted to save money, we'd fly at green dot (and w/ the significantly over blocked leg times, we'd still be on-time mostly). That would save more money by far.

I have a better solution. Why don't we INVEST in better people at the gate, more friendly ticket counter personnel, update our flyfrontier app and pay labor more. Then, we improve our on time rating, our customer service and our reputation. Then we charge more for a ticket to make up for the invested funds. This is the same way ALL of the other profitable airlines did it.