FWIW there have been some rumors of late centered around another 1900 operation to involve some flying for AA (connection?) out of St Louis....hmmmmm


When are the bids over?

 

the local 6 cities up for rebidding have until the 16th to put in a recomendation to the DOT. After that it should be a quick decision to see who wins. The leading candidtates in my opinion are Gulfstream, Cape Air, and the dark horse is Air Choice One.

 

if anyone wants to look over the actual bid paperwork, they can all be found here:

www.regionalaviationpartners.org

 

Latest I heard is that we MAY start hiring again in January, and Beech upgrades in November.

 

This industry is in a sad state of affairs when Great Lakes is being under cut.

 

Not to flame but please take the time to download the proposals from the above link and read all six of them. You might learn quite a bit about the EAS bidding process and what the Companys will look at in making their bids. They may be dry reading but they are definatly worth the read. Its not always as cut and dry as who bids the least, you will see that if you read them all. After what Ive read, I'ts not that GL is being underbid, its who puts together the best grouping of city pairs with fair price, combined with frequency of departures and size of aircraft, balanced with the gate fees and such at hubs, and what kind of guarentee the company is willing to promise, by risking the subsidy monies if they fail to complete them. I found it interesting that one operator guarrenteed a 100% completion (except for Wx cancellations), and it was not who youd expect. Please dont make assumptions without doing the research.

 

It is interesting to see how the EAS bidding works, thanks for posting the link to the paperwork. How does the EAS service get linked up with a mainline carrier (AA connection, UA Express, etc) It seems that these bids range from offering service to STL, ORD, MEM.

 

As of now GL doesn't link up with anyone. there is no AA connection in any of the cities out of STL operated by Great Lakes. That is one of the primary reasons that Great Lakes has failied at the station that I work(DEC). We have two major fortune 500 companies that do alot of international travel. despite the fact that we fly to STL daily, they still prefer to bus people to ORD to catch international flights.

Only one of the bidders has said that they have agreeements in principle(read: we might just be full of it) to go to ORD with gate availability, and ground handling. It would be nice. If anyone wants anymore details on the proceedings feal free to PM me.

When there was a code share airline here in DEC, emplaned pax totaled close to 16K per year, as of this past year we only hit around 1200. That may have to deal with the fact that STL has dramatically decreased flying as well. anyway, I don't want to rant too much. I've had a great time working the ramp for Lakes since I've been furloughed, and don't want to speak badly of them. I just hope for the best here at a lowly EAS outstation.

 

As Shulz said no AA codeshare, the main reason no one uses us (go figure). They wanted us to paint our STL plane in connection colors but apparently the five other schemes we now have are enough

Right? However we are giving it up. Unless we procure more flying or we have a signifigant number of pilots leave I wouldn't anticipate new-hire classes any time soon.

 

Right, Lakes isn't being undercut, we didn't re-bid on the cities.