sailingfun

Atlanta is maxed out for gates right now. If they put 21 nines in ATL then they will have to pull out a bunch of much more fuel efficient aircraft. Not much chance of that. Simply take a quick look at the fuel burn of the nine to a more modern aircraft. At 4 dollar a gallon jet fuel the savings in fuel from leasing a EMB 195 would pay the entire lease payment for a year in one month.

acl65pilot

Yes, but do you not think that there is some strange coincidence to them scrapping the whole concourse C that was planned for Jet ways. Many of those gates can take a nine. On top of that there are plenty of gates on A,B,D, and E that DCI is using that we can put the 9's in to.
From what I was told DCI was operating out of these gates to show use on them throughout the day. This in turn gave the ATL airport board no leverage to have us relinquish any of our gates.
Trust me the 9, 330 and 744 will be here by next summers schedule.

DAL4EVER

I bet we see some 757-300s as well. I guess that will be another differences course on top of the TWA 757-231s, the 767-300s, the ERs and the Gulf Air ERs. Awesome! Whatever it takes to protect the domestic 757 flying is all I care about. What was the concourse C thing you mention above? I don't think I've heard that.

sailingfun

The nines will be here as planned. That means that out of 160 there will be 61 left at the end of 08 and around 40 at the end of 09. The remaining aircraft which will all be 40's and 50's will be phased out by 2012. Its in print. They are executing the plan as we speak. Not sure why no one seems to want to except this. We need to get over the nines going away and work on recapturing that flying for the mainline.

acl65pilot

Amen.
We need to do that.

ASA, the city of ATL and DAL had initially dedicated the sale of 45-50 million in bonds back in 04 and 05 that ASA, and DAL would pay back in the form of a higher lease rate on the gates.
What the plan was is to have ramp access to all of the gates on C with lower level boarding. Read no jet ways. They were going to build glass atriums along the expanse of both concourses. This hit a snag in early 06 as it was way over budget. Their solution was less elevators to the boarding area and more escalators, as they are only about 1/4 the cost. The plan was going ahead as planned, and then last year it all started to change, and wala we have jet ways in ATL on C. This is great and needed to be done, but it also was done for another reason. We can literally use two spots over there for an 88 in an emergency.

caddis

Oh, well if it is in print it must be true! I do agree though that if/when the DC-9 and MD 88s get parked that flying must be captured by mainline.

acl65pilot

Well if we do not relax scope anymore it will have to be. There is no way to make up that flying by the 36 175's and the 70 seaters. Even management knows that.

Superpilot92

If true, it would appear that DAL wants to go for the jugular at Airtran.

acl65pilot

Super this is a known fact. We are matching their prices seat for seat in every market.

Superpilot92

Well the more aircraft we keep online or pull from storage the better.