CFIse

This statement is proof positive that you don't want to trust just about anything this poster has to say.

Mesa was not "fined" $30M, they paid UAL $30M in "pay for play" at the start of the initial contract (when they lost the US Air contract to AWAC, which coincidentally "paid to play" to get that work). At the start of the year they wrote down that $30M off the books.

To be able to define that as a "fine" paid to UAL is a VERY twisted version of the facts.

CFIse

The "books" are public - but there is no requirement for the "books" to break-out individual contracts and to share their profitability. So we don't know if XJET is doing LAX flying at a loss, we don't know if their branded flying is operating at a profit or a loss or how much of either. We can speculate, and Lord knows we love to do that, but we don't KNOW.

As an example, and relevant since this thread is about Mesa, at the start of the year Mesa "wrote-off" a whole bunch of money, some pay to play at UAL, some start-up costs of the DAL Dash operation and some other MX related stuff. They did this because they suddenly decided these operations were unprofitable and they could no longer amortize those costs over the life of the contract. Yet these were fee for departure contracts, they were either unprofitable at the start or not, but they didn't go unprofitable half-way through. However, any airline has lots of fixed costs, how you apportion those fixed costs can make a specific contract profitable or unprofitable. I suspect that if you could look into Mesa books (and what an ugly sight that would be) you'd find that the DAL ERJ flying suddenly got HUGELY profitable as their fixed costs got dumped over onto UAL and the Dash flying to make them unprofitable. But that information doesn't have to be disclosed, so we'll never know.

Mesa will be profitable this year, and most years. It'll be a smaller profit (although the long term books will be a little cleaner) but on fee for departure it's almost impossible to lose any significant amount of money on basic operating revenue and costs unless you have a really bad contract and/or a really inefficient management system. At a minimum Mesa has a bad 50-seat contract at UAL, but it has a good contract at DAL and good contracts on the 70 seaters at UAL. Love it or leave it, Mesa is also low cost all the way, so it's hard for them to lose money.

They can write long term debt off against short term revenue, but those are one-time events and even for Mesa it'd be hard to find enough long term debt to legally write-off to show a whole year loss.

Losses to Hawaiin and Aloha would be significant one-time events that would knock the profit back for a year, but I, personally, don't think the award will be anything like what was asked for. The judge has already decided Mesa used the confidential docs. once and refused an injunction, it's not probable he's going to make a different decision this time.

The FACT is - low cost is where it's at in the legacy to regional relationship and the FACT is Mesa is low-cost (along with all the related issues, poor quality, upset employees etc). Until that changes (and I don't see it changing soon) Mesa will continue to survive and, dare I say it, thrive.

POPA

Man, how embarassing would it be that your coverup is "I was deleting porn"? Seriously kids, if your excuse for whatever it was you were doing involves porn, you probably shouldn't have been doing it in the first place!

nwa757

Mesa is such a disgrace of a company. Don't let ANYONE you know apply there.