Republic buying compass?
 

discuss amongst yourselves

crazier things have happened! BB has had some subtle prophecies in some of his weekly sermons! I wouldnt doubt to see it happen!

Not going to happen. Why would they buy compass and how considering they were just created. If RAH is going to pick up another certificate I'll lay my money on Comair since they already own like 91million worth of them.

"Republic Airways is the largest operator of the E-Jet in the world: 95 EMB170/175s in its fleet and delivery of 26 EMB175s scheduled by the end of 2008"

This would be a good way to get more "E" acft, delivery positions and crews. NWA then exercises options on CRJ900s and expands Mesaba. Both get standardized fleet savings, increased capacity and less headaches.

would seem the only way that makes since though would be if along with the purchase of compass they got a long term deal out of NWA to utilize those aircraft.

Seems pretty far fetched but ya just never know in this crazy bizness.

This has been rumored since Compass was announced...

One word - MidAtlantic.

These two airlines have different unions. Not sure how that would play out. NWA flow through and other issues would make this interesting.

Unfortunately, there is a precedent for the union acquisition. Look at what happened to Shuttle America.

USAirways needed to sell off MidAtlantic to stay liquid and hold on long enough to be bought out.
NWA, on the other hand, just posted a huge profit and is far from having a liquidity crisis. There are also ALPA contract restrictions that prevent NWA from selling Compass until NWA has 10 of a new type of narrowbody aircraft on the property (they haven't even placed an order yet). Certainly, under the right circumstances, it wouldn't be impossible for those restrictions to go away under a new TA, but I see no reason to think that will happen in the current business environment.
NWA does not need the cash in the near term, and since Compass currently has only 5 or 6 aircraft, but another 30 on the way, it would make little sense for NWA to sell off Compass now, in it's infancy, when they would be able to get far more money selling it as a mature operation.
Also, when the time does come to sell I'm not so sure NWA will be interested in selling the operation as a whole to another carrier, when they have done so well in the past selling regionals through IPOs. E-jets are becoming very popular, and Compass stands to be the only real competition to Republic in the US regional E-jet market. I'm sure NWA knows that, and they're probably willing to bet that Wall Street will notice too.
So, basically, Republic might want to buy Compass, but I seriously doubt Compass is for sale.

This has happened before a la MidAtlantic, however I don't see it happening in the near term with Compass. While they may fly the same aircraft, they most certainly are not direct competition for RAH. Compass is strictly an NWA venture and I don't think you're going to see an NWA subsidiary start bidding on RAH's E-jet flying for DAL, UAL, Frontier, or US Air. RAH has no ties to NWA and I haven't even heard the faintest rumor of even trying to get in the door with those guys.

Except for the Compass aircraft, BB pretty much has the options for any other U.S. bound 170/175's locked up through 2009...and as I said before, they're not really direct competition for us. Especially since we can't really accept airframes at any rate faster than we already are.

Also, BB wouldn't move on Compass until they had all their aircraft in place. Plus NWA would have to purchase 10 new airframes. I wouldn't put it past him, but I also wouldn't hold my breath since it would be years before anything would come down the pipe.

Finally, BB is not a fan of consolidating for the heck of it. He's stated several times that from this point forward the company plan is more "home-grown" growth of the business rather than merging with other companies just to get bigger. We've got long term contracts in place with UAL, DAL, US, CAL, and Frontier. The only thing coming up close to this decade is the old TWA/AA flying and God only knows where that's going to go. I don't think there's any interest in renewing since the contract is just a carryover from the TWA days and BB has said numerous times he wants to shift towards competing on the "larger regional" market. The Delta 135's are already gone essentially and I think the AA 140's are next. If was to predict anything, they'll build up the UAL and DAL flying with more 170/175's and move the exsisting 145's on those two codeshares over to CAL to start replacing the CRJ.