Dave Campbell (the CEO of Horizon) stated on a pilot chat, that he has no interest in feeding virgin out of SFO and since Skywest already has an established domicile there, skywest can have all the SFO virgin flying.

The contract we agreed to last year guarantees QX 33 175's, and at least 50% of any remaining options that are converted to orders. Originally, the Q400 fleet would have started getting drawn down this year, but QX renewed the leases on those 15 airplanes, so we don't quite know what's going on there.

That said, our current staffing issues are already leading to Q's being taken out of service (by sending them in early for heavy checks), so unless this bonus magically solves the hiring issues here, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we start parking Q's as the 175 deliveries begin.

From what's been said by various management types, it sounds like Alaska wants to use QX to provide a Virgin feed out of California, but seeing as we can't staff our current flying, I have no clue how they think that's going to work.

The new contract gets activated once the first jet arrives on property too. Wouldn't put it above air group to say "Sorry, we can't staff these" and give them to OO, but keep 1 jet so they can activate mother fking PBS.

I think the fact they sent the planes they wanted to park into heavy checks to avoid having to furlough pilots says something. They want the planes to fly, but they don't want to pay pilots to fly them.

SFO turns on the Q would suck balls. OO can have it for all I care, we have enough problems up north.

There's about 20 lifer FOs here who are no longer seatlocked and will most likely bid the jet. On the last conference call they said new hires could expect end of april jet classes.

Since the heavy checks are expensive (which was the reasoning behind not renewing the leases in the first place), I doubt QX would spend the money on a heavy check just to avoid furloughs.

As much as I distrust our management, I think their reasoning for sending the airplanes into the check early (the process takes longer than predicted, and they want the airplanes for the summer schedule) makes a certain amount of sense, even if they did conveniently leave off the fact that a lack of staffing meant the airplanes wouldn't be flying now anyway.

Any talk of a SAN base?

It's no secret that the Air Group wants to expand our network in California. I've heard speculation about a Bay Area base (SFO?) as well as a San Diego base. I doubt that this would happen before the late 2018 - early 2019 time frame.

Why would QX furlough pilots? We're reducing the flying due to lack of staffing (they can call it MX or WX all they want, we all know why it's being done...), not reducing the staffing due to lack of flying. Am I missing something here?

You're not missing anything, WSPLT. None of the corporate communications mentioned the word "furlough" (in fact, our VP of Operations has just gotten around to admitting that we're short-staffed). The first quarter of the year is always the slowest, so the company may have just seen this as a good time to get some heavy maintenance out of the way. There also might be some legitimate accounting reasons to spend the money now.

By the time delta is finished expanding, SEA is going to be just as bad or worse than sfo.