Fixed it for you..

Well of course they are happy. If they didn't want to be at AA or another airline, they wouldn't have taken the time to apply and do what they could to get hired. We have pilots who are actually happy at Spirit or Frontier that would rather be here than AA for their own personal reasons. Many of them haven't updated their apps since they got hired. To say how many from ULCC went to AA vs AA going to ULCC is not a good argument. Take a look at some of the other thread and you'll see many "Should i leave this airline for that airline?" The pay is better at AA but QOL is subjective, and who knows what the future holds for any airline.

I don't think any of us really care if the junior pilots leave or stay. There's still thousands of pilots out there waiting to take their place.

I am not sure the conventional wisdom even applies any more. These ULCCs are growing 16-17% year over year. They have a young fleet of highly fuel efficient aircraft and a relatively young workforce which means their pilots are less costly even if they had the same payscales as the legacies - which they do not. It is an enormous advantage.

So which airlines are going to do better in the next recession - F9 and NK with their 4-5 year old A320 fleet or legacies like AA with their mixed aircraft fleet with an average age of 11 years (and a $23 Billion debt), United, and Delta both with 15 year old and less fuel efficient fleets? It might well be the ULCCs.

And please don’t say the Big Three are too big to fail, all three of them have been in bankruptcy in the last 16 years. We may be seeing a paradigm shift where the ULCCs are the airline equivalent of streaming video compared to the legacies DVD rental or (for those that remember) VHS.

Im going to go out on a limb and say the fact that MASSPORT approached AA about wanting to take some of their gates away because they had the lowest gate utilization rate compared to DL/UL/B6 had more to do with adding those flights than the price of fuel.

At least in Delta’s case, there is an enormous hedge built-in against a downturn - owned jets. With fuel prices low, economy strong, and MAX stored - the old planes still make a lot of money. If the economy starts to sour, DL can essentially throttle the owned 88s/90s/717s/757s/767s, and basically ‘park to profitability’. I would suspect that most ULCCs have a majority of their fleet leased, and it’s not as cheap or easy to park/return to lessor. Now of course I hope that scenario doesn’t occur, but with the thousands of pilots retiring in next few years - it’s hard to see a substantial furlough occurring at the legacy level. I can’t say i’m as confident for the ULCCs.
Lastly, when the economy dips, discretionary spending is typically the first thing that gets pulled back. The family trip to Disney gets put on hold, but the business trip to LAX is still going. Legacy carriers pay the bills with business travelers who are typically less sensitive to market swings.

I'm guessing Spirit canceled them because they saw the competition was too great and realized yields would be trashed. AA didn't add flights because fuel prices had decreased, but your point about them adding flights due to gate utilization certainly has merit. I could see that.

That is former NWA thinking. They called the DC9 the "accumulator fleet" for that reason. For an airline, a solid strategy.

There’s nothing revolutionary/disruptive about ULCCs. All they do is pay all of their employees below market rates. Not exactly a new idea.

That’s interesting, because I’ve heard the exact same thing about RDU: AA has the lowest gate utilization in Raleigh and the airport was threatening to do the same there.


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