I believe its because your management is setting the company up for a sale. It would be difficult with an RJ operation, since the most likely purchasers are already at their scope limit, and your RJ feed would have put them over the limit and caused problems.

Proposing the pseudo-international flights are a good example because JB lacks the economies of scale to make that work, like we have seen WOW and others not be able to survive without a fully integrated network.

I’d say no merger now, but if the stock goes under $4B there are going to be some interested parties.

 

Pretty much none of this is true.

 

Thank you.

It kind of amazes me to watch the legacy try to claw back scope and yet we have our guys saying ehhh it wasn’t in the plan so they just gave it to us. Our management gets more like a legacy management team everyday it would never surprise me if they went hmmmmm maybe we could do JetBlue express.

 

JetBlue doesn’t have a network out of BOS or JFK? I don’t see how they can’t make 321lrs flying across the Atlantic work. Most of the plane will be mint it’s not like they are betting the farm here,

I’m not saying we aren’t for sale but I don’t see TATL as something that won’t work. They have already played around with the product and the plane and it had a big impact on our transcon performance so I don’t see or the Atlantic as that big of a stretch.

 

Off the top of my head I can think of several reasons why it won’t work:
Slot control and JBs inability to gain any meaningful/desirable slots.
JB flying into LGW, not LHR.
On time performance (or you know, lack thereof).
Lack of larger network.
Fare wars with VERY determined legacy carriers keeping prices lower than JB can keep up with.

 

Blah....Economies of Scale is a macroeconomic buzzword.

JetBlue doesn’t want any part of connecting traffic beyond the local city pair. They want the premium traffic of the local market.

Now if you want to talk about the lost revenue with the LR from international cargo operations - then you'd have a point.

 

It wasn't in JB's plan, and they did give it to JBALPA without a fight. No one has suggested the pilots were wrong to fight for no RJs, but as it turns out, no fight was needed. As for legacies, RJs WERE in the corporate plan and business model, and those pilots gave scope up voluntarily in some cases, and in bankruptcy in other cases. And yes, they are trying hard to claw that back.

But one thing has nothing to do with the other, and NO ONE has suggested JB pilots shouldn't have expected or demanded RJ scope.

But.... you seem to suggest that JB doesn't give any consideration to their future business plans when negotiating a CBA or otherwise...

And... you've been at JB a long time now, when have you EVER known them to have extra gates? Other than LGB, when have you ever known them to have extra surplus slots? The Industry is going into a period of very tight pilot supply. JB has, for years now, been in a consistent UP-gauging trend. 200 seat A321s (when not chasing premium Mint revenue). Swapping 100 seat E180s for 140 seat A220-***300**s. A corporation almost exclusively focused on cutting costs to the bone, lower CASM.

Now you want me to believe they are going to use those valuable gates (that they don't have) and valuable slots (that they don't have) and valuable pilots (that will be in very short supply and will be needed by JBLU and all the legacy airlines) and will suddenly reverse their corporate philosophy of UP-gauging... to not move 140-200 people per departure with that valuable (and scarce) infrustructure, but to instead move 50-76 people in a high-CASM low-service RJ?

NOT. BUYING. IT.

 

Hey man capitalize all you want but I never know what they will do or who will run the company. I have 27 years left and this issue won’t be an issue.

But are we going to argue that JetBlue doesn’t reverse their corporate philosophy? Yeah it’s up gauging NOW, but I would argue Mint, charging for bags and the attempted purchase of Virgin were some big changes in philosophy.

If you say NO ONE should have not expected us to demand or get RJ scope what is the issue? We got it, oh but they just gave it to us. So after we got it should we have given it back? If the company would have waited till the end and fought us on it would that be better?

Heck to me it makes the company look dumb. Depends on how you want to play it. I would have held the “worthless” thing till the end and made the union fight to get it giving it more value in their mind, while the company doesn’t actually care.

Now I know the argument is going to be well “it showed good faith” and they used that to show they were negotiating when they really weren’t and it kept us passive and the union used scope to sell the CBA and on and on. Probably really strong arguments there.

So this just goes round and round. In the end we have scope and that’s good but we have work to do on other sections as does every CBA out there.( ours might require more)

 

Exactly.

They want to serve the top markets from Boston and London is one of them. If they have the plane they already fly and the product and the geography why wouldn’t you do it?

 

The problem is guys say "yeah, this , that, and the next everything sucks in the CBA, but at least we got scope"... Which is another way of saying "yeah, it all sucks, but at least we got something that the company valued less than a bag of Blue Chips".

And yeah, the company COULD change nearly everything about it's business plan.

And unicorns and Sasquatchs COULD be real.

And I COULD come home to find that my wife has hired Jessica Alba as a live-in nanny.

As I said, no JB pilot has suggested that RJ scope wasn't expected/demanded, but it's not a good justification for expecting/justifying a crummy CBA.