Long term scope and contract negotiations
 

Everyone is negotiating or beginning to negotiate new contracts, and at the top of the "wish list" for management is scope relaxation. It doesn't matter the airline, they all want it, and bad. After years and years of scope relief and the regional airlines overtaking the majority of domestic flying, we are finally at a point where pilots have gotten smart and said no more scope, and no exceptions.

So the question is, now that management is starting to realize that pilots will not budge on scope, how long will it take (or will it ever make sense financially) for the majors to bring the regional flying back in house to save money again?

They are stuck with 50 seaters that are losing money, they are limited on 76 seaters, they want to replace some airplanes with upcoming 100 seat aircraft (C-series and like). But if pilots never budge on scope... Discuss...

May we live in interesting times...

codesharing

Age 70......

There is no money in cargo.

TEN

Code Sharing is HUGE!!!

SKYW for a vast majority of their property and ground equipment own everything or control their leases (the dixie college boys with their funny underwear and puffy hairdo wives are not dumb). Maybe not the aircraft but everything else.
So they now they decide well in certain markets or city pairs we will operate our own brand flying say a 100 seat C series. Then DAL AMR UAL can then just code share with us and they get the 100 seat feed we get access to say a nice SABRE res system which costs will be subsidized by the mainline and magically the jobs shift!

Scope is great to focus on but But Alaska, Skywest et all can operate a c-series and fly their brand and code share with the legacy! let's not lose sight of this fact when we are distracted by scope only! This is where language needs to be rock solid for any union....... Including SWA (what is SWA scope Language?))

Just sayin......:mad:

I don't separate the two. Code sharing is a large part of scope. If (really when) SKYW's ego gets the better of them we need to go all in and euthanize them no matter how much it costs until only one of us is standing. If its them, so be it (but I'm pretty sure it won't be).

SkyWest is planning on this happening and is gearing up for it as we speak. One of the many reasons they bought XJT was for the leases on a bunch of gates that XJT had for 10-15 years in places like SMF, ONT, RNO, SAT, AUS, etc........They won't be doing it with new CSeries but with old 737s that they will "help" UCal get off the balance sheet. They want the routes like AUS-DEN to be all SKW with codeshares on multiple mainline carriers like Alaska but on a bigger scale. Watch out for tricky codeshare language in the next contract.

Skywest will be flying UAL routes with transferred 737's ? Can't wait to see that. UAL/CAL guys will then join AA pilots at the picnic table we're now at. DAL won't be far behind then.

A LOT of current regional guys are high-fivers it sounds like and are salivating at the prospect.

ACA tried to do this in IAD. They owned the RJ gates on the A concourse, essentially every RJ gate in IAD, a monopoly on United Express gates. It seemed like a good position to strong-arm United from.

United (@ huge expense and great inconvenience to their passengers) built a temporary RJ terminal @ IAD and bussed most of their United Express passengers to this facility, until ACA/Independence Air folded. I'm not sure who owns the RJ gates on the A concourse in IAD now, but I'd bet it's United. United should be wise to this kind of 'gate lease leverage', based on their past with ACA (and Delta's with Commair pilots in CVG - never allow your network to be controlled via monopoly by an entity other than your own mainline if at all possible).

How Skywest's future turns out depends not only on the scope/code-share language in the mainline pilot contract (why don't FA's have to do any of this heavy lifting, BTW?), but also on continuing to curry the favor of the mainline management. All the gate leases in the world in outstations mean nothing if the outstation airport manager is faced with the prospect of losing United, Delta, and/or American service to his airport unless he's willing to figure out a way for the big network airlines to continue to serve the field, gate leases be d@mned.

I'm certainly not advocating going without scope/codeshare protection, just bringing up the idea that the future of carrier's like Skywest isn't assured with gate leases. Are there no empty gates @ SMF, ONT, RNO, SAT, AUS, etc.?