DOJ wins NEA lawsuit
 

Discuss…

filler

Hurts AA more than it hurts us I’d say. AA has been parking regional jets left and right, now losing our “regional feed.”

B6 has been dying to grow but can’t get airplanes. Now we will have airplanes.

Also, helps the case for the merger if we’re not tied up with one of the big three.

i agree. I think the company is privately excited about this ruling.

My guess is JBLU only wanted to win this thing as a way to trade it in court for the merger.

I'm guessing there will be an appeals process?

why would they be excited ? they lost 192M during the 1st quarter, and that was WITH AA as a prom date. Now what?

Spirit merger was blocked also

excited about what? "the opportunities ahead now that we are free of distractions?"

:cool::rolleyes:

Really guys now we’re free and clear to operate our own 350s to Milan and Berlin!!! Bwahaha 🤣

Ding dong the witch is dead

Buyyyyyyyye Felicia

Gonna make commuting to LGA from BOS less fun

The catalyst that destroyed our pairings is gone.

We get an email this week on what the company can do to improve the pairings.

One of the biggest hurdles to the merger is gone.

Almost seems scripted.

A lot of our really junior pilots were able to upgrade to the 190 due to this NEA flying, so this isn’t some big victory for JetBlue and the pilot group like some are making it out to be. NEA just failed….what if the Spirit transaction fails….where does that leave us?

They just got out of the NEA for free. Zero penalties have to be paid to AA now. The NEA was a necessity of Covid but it no longer serves JB well. It super concentrated our network into already stressed airports and destroyed our route structure.

I think it also only enhances our argument for the merger.

It’s all part of the political process; allow the headline of a “win” for the DOJ, followed by the future approval of JetBlue/Spirit merger with concessions so the Biden administration looks good.

Agree. I don’t think for a second Robin and Co felt the NEA would last in a post NK merger. It only strengthens their case for the NK merger, and that’s the big fish they really want to land.

That airplane is on its way out anyway regardless of todays decision. Plus they’ll be replaced by a higher paying airplane. Sure, there might be some temporary pain but it was always going to be that way.

Couldn’t agree more. This was a shortsighted COVID strategy that turned us into Eagle. I remember asking Scott Lawrence who was the architect of this thing at one of those Pilot happy hours at Sonny’s why this was good for us, and why wouldn’t it be better to just grow all that flying ourselves or better yet buy Frontier or Spirit. Couldn’t give me a good answer other than COVID. We all knew COVID would go away and we’d be stuck as AA’s regional.

Meanwhile he’s now at AA.

BTW, not a mention of this on the AA forum which shows how much they care about it. I guess they did just get an AIP today.

$184 million of JetBlue’s market cap just evaporated.
I would say the investment community believes this is not a trivial situation.

Article from BOS TV Station
 

https://www.wcvb.com/article/jetblue...iance/43945604

JetBlue says it's "Studying the judgement" and "evaluating our next steps".

JBLU stock didn’t really move any more or less than any other airline stock.

Correct me if I’m wrong but didn't B6 gain gate space at places like LGA and EWR via the NEA? Seems like much of the growth at LGA was totally based on the NEA and gates provided by AA. I agree, no way management thought this would survive the merger process but it seems like unwinding the NEA could be painful if not unprofitable.

The plan was to draw down a lot of that flying this summer anyway. Losing slots is never a good thing, but might free up crews and airplanes to shift out of the Northeast and expand elsewhere. Rumors of new bases for the last couple of years, maybe now is the time?

Maybe I am missing something, however weren’t those slots always American’s and they were just letting Jetblue use them through the NEA? With Jetblue pulling flying from the northeast due to the ATC shortage, they give the slots back and now it’s American’s problem to utilize them. Right now their regionals sure don’t have the pilots to fill those slots and It would seem that American would be under pressure to keep those slots. This appears to be a bigger problem for American than Jetblue but I’m just a line pilot and it’s above my pay grade.

They should save the time and effort they're spending on this study by just reading this thread. No need for a long report -- it can clearly be explained in 2 or 3 sentences 🙂

“Studying the judgement”🙄…translation: coming up with a way to spin this as a “poor us” to the judge for the merger

Looks to me like Blue gets to keep all Spirits gates/slots in the northeast now...

Tell me you don’t understand investor relations without telling me you don’t understand investor relations.

Expand elsewhere.....to me that stinks of less profitable.

Can’t get much less profitable than the ~30% or worse load factors of BOS-LGA.

seeing as the company doesn’t believe in profit sharing IDGAF.

If it forces diversification at the cost of a little profitability I’m all for it.

Agree, company doesn't want us to care about profitability.

I don’t see it that way, but it’s hard to predict the future. I think the DOJ will be emboldened by this recent decision and will put on a full court press trying to prove to the judge that B6/NK is harmful to consumers, just like they were able to show with the NEA. No NEA or merger….where does that leave JetBlue is the million dollar question.

The NEA was a completely different animal than B6 + NK. It was essentially geographically-defined virtual merger between an LCC and a legacy. There wasn’t much case law to support two companies being able to coordinate operations like that wo going through the established antitrust/M&A process.

B6+NK is a conventional full-on merger. There is a large corpus of administrative/statutory/case law history governing the pathway to approval. The DOJ can’t just block it on a whim, they have to support their claim that it will hurt competition, which I expect will be an uphill battle given that B6 + NK combined will still be way smaller than any of the big 4. We also have plenty of data showing that B6 has a larger impact on price vs. NK, because we compete directly w/the legacies on price and product, over the same finite pool of consumers

I’m confident at the end of the day, the politicians will posture, we’ll divest a few gates and slots here and there, and we’ll get through it.

Exactly, there is zero precedent in the NEA and the judge was left with only deciding based on anti-trust law and in this specific case he ruled pretty much the only way he could with what was before him. The merger has a ton of precedent that the court will need to balance as well as anti-trust laws.

NEA-Obama appointed judge
Merger-Reagan appointed judge.

Sometimes I think it’s that simple. Ol boy just needs to keep above ground until November.

Due to this tragedy the company is now being forced to cut our profit sharing checks by 90%.

Thanks Biden....

does this mean I’m going to owe money to JetBlue???😭😅😂

And since profit sharing didn’t even make the top 5 in the ALPA survey last year, the pilot group doesn’t really care either.

as another said, this was a “merger without a merger”. JB was never going to win this lawsuit.

There’s a reason profit sharing didn’t make it in the top 5. It’s because it wasn’t educated by the NC/MEC properly (by design). I suspect PS will be fought for a little harder, educated a bit better in things like contract comparison guides and negotiation info that is put out, especially since it seems to be an industry standard thing now.

That's a Bingo. But it's sad, and moronical, that our peers don't want an industry standard contract (or better), including all the standard components an airline pilot at our level of the industry enjoy.

Hot take, I really don't care about having more money. More money cannot buy more time with the people I care about.
I want more days at home, better health care for my family, and a reworked reserve grid/ drop-swap system (so I can spend more of my life not at work).

I'm not saying these should be your priorities; but plenty of people have different priorities than profit sharing.

JB has pretty solid work rules by and large, and I hope we continue to improve them. Particularly around pairing construction and fatigue there are a lot of improvements to be made, but more money spent on us won't fix that. Perhaps more money spent on soft time would.