Originally Posted by bradthepilot

You know how it's funny listening in to private pilots having a discussion about how they'd take control and save the day if the flight crew somehow became incapacitated and was unable to perform their duties? It's kind of the same thing listening to airline pilots talk about what business travel is like when they've never worked in an industry that does so on a regular basis.

Aside from Zoom and other teleconferencing really only being useful to maintain existing relationships vice building new ones as rickair pointed out, traveling for meetings is a subset of what business travel accounts for. Aside from the "meeting" that is discussed here, I've done business travel in a previous life to :
1) Build a new team
2) Search for/inspect new property
3) Purchase a high dollar piece of equipment
4) Install a new system at a customer site
5) Troubleshoot a system after doing so remotely proved unworkable

...and I'm aware of others who have done all that (and more) without attending the typical "meeting" that is talked about here.

On top of that, work-from-home isn't the panacea that it's made out to be and the business world is just figuring that out:
Wall Street Journal Article

No doubt business travel will be slow to return, and it will look different when it does, but it will return. The notion that teleconferencing can and will replace it is just pants-on-the-head crazy.

Originally Posted by rickair7777

The lost decade was worse, at least based on what we know right now. COVID is a single discrete event, and while it's deeper and uglier at face value it has a likely discrete end-point (vaccine). We will also not be fighting trillion-dollar wars over covid for the next 20 years (hopefully).

The lost decade was a combination 9/11, SARS, 2008 downturn + sky-high oil prices, and to top it all off age 65. Also what a lot of people don't realize is that on 9/11/2001 the industry still carried a lot of pre-deregulation fat... that all got trimmed during the lost decade.

If it hadn't been for age 65 it would have been the lost half-decade. It's unlikely they'll raise the age again, especially now, and even if they do it would only be 67 (there's international precedent for that).

Baring any other black-swans, and still considering (now accelerated) retirements I suspect things will be back on track sooner than many folks might think. Five years of little or no hiring is a pretty typical of industry cycles, even though it may be a big wakeup call for the younger crowd (Congrats, you've had your cherry popped by the industry )

Even if the big three are down longer-term, there will still be some opportunity in cargo and LCC, and those are still good livings by most standards. Also this is going to scare off a bunch of new entrants, so there will be opportunity for those who stick it out (I've seen that movie before too).

Originally Posted by Excargodog

For the Big Three it’s sort of a perfect storm of ugliness. Their big money makers - international and business flying - are hurt the worst and likely to recover the slowest (and for business flying, incompletely). And all the aircraft optimized for those niches must either be parked (driving up overhead costs with non productive assets) or reconfigured (if possible) to support regular domestic flying. At the same time they have had to bribe the personnel flying that equipment to retire or train them (at non trivial cost of both lost productivity and training personnel resources) to fly equipment more suited to regular domestic flying and thereby generating huge costs for the retirees and huge costs for the training churn (which much of the latter will need to be undone if/when international and business flying returns as will the equipment reconfigurations).

The overall slowdown and shrinking of all flying is going to shrink scope which is going to shrink all the regionals with the potential exception of Horizon. In many areas the Big Three have been using their own flying and that if their regional affiliates to essentially block competition by tying up limited gate availability. That won’t be possible in the immediate future, allowing the LCC/ULCC folks to get their foot in the door at even the fortress hubs and once there they will be difficult to dislodge.

And, speaking of competition, there will be competition - competition that does not share either the legacy costs of some of the Big Three or the expenses of multiple fleet types (and some of those antiquated and inefficient). Competition like Breeze using ultra efficient aircraft that can make long skinny routes economical crewed by all newbies with nobody yet up to year three on the payscale. And again, the LCC/ULCCs flying single type equipment with relatively junior crews are getting more efficient aircraft, NEOs and MAXs, that are going to carve into the not only domestic market share but the Hawaii traffic and much of the near international (Caribbean, Central and South America) and maybe even into some of the European flying that was the exclusive niche of the Big Three.

every airline’s CASM is going to be driven up by the reduced flying and furloughs, if only because they’ll be losing junior (payscale relatively cheap) pilots and retaining senior (payscale relatively expensive) pilots, but the Big Three will be affected by this to a considerably greater extent (and for a considerably longer period) than the LCC/ULCCs and it is no longer impossible to believe that any of the Big Three, especially AA with its massive debt load - is too big to fail. And like pattern bargaining in wage negotiations, one of the Big Three going into bankruptcy puts a lot of pressure on the others to try to get relieved of their debts and expensive contracts by taking that route too.

But for the LCC/ULCCs and newbies like Breeze (who figured to lose money the first few years in any event) it won’t be a lost decade. Maybe another year and a half at worst, IMHO.

Originally Posted by 303flyboy

Save this post. I think will show to be very accurate

Originally Posted by SonicFlyer

I have not heard this before and would like to read more about it. Do you have any links or citations?

Originally Posted by Excargodog

You “guessing” that I was referring to other factors seems a creature of your own invention, and your repeated statements that “almost none of Boeing is in the city of Seattle” belies the existence of a rather large Boeing facility - essentially everything on KBFI west of the long runway except for one aviation museum.

Originally Posted by yakfisher

I don’t read long posts. No one has a crystal ball. Is this going to be bad? Yes. How long? Pretty long until it gets better.

Turn the media off and enjoy life in front of you. We can’t even predict if we will survive tomorrow.

Originally Posted by yakfisher

I don’t read long posts. No one has a crystal ball. Is this going to be bad? Yes. How long? Pretty long until it gets better.

Turn the media off and enjoy life in front of you. We can’t even predict if we will survive tomorrow.