Quote:
Originally Posted by Timbo
I guess it depends on how you define 'bigger'.
I see 737's replacing 757's and 767's (Domestic routes)
I see 787's eventually replacing 767ER's (a wash, size wise?) but maybe replacing 777's in 10 years, and 747's maybe sooner than that. The last I heard, the 787 is about the size of a 767ER, not the size of a 777 or 747.
I see the 717's as our only 'growth' airplane. Do we call that bigger? It is bigger than a 50 or 76 seat RJ, no doubt, but it's the smallest 'manline' airframe out there.
I don't see that as bigger, just more small narrow body flying with the 737's ((-900) and 717's.
I don't see Bigger coming any time soon, until we order and take delivery of something as big as the 777-300 and 747, I'm not holding my breath waiting for those. In the mean time, we will have pilots displaced off the 767/757 to the 737-900.
Let's not confuse the short-term, and the long-term trend. As I said, maybe this airline went counter-evolutionary for a while (and it just about killed us), but as a whole, you look at the industry over time, and we've definitely gone bigger, and bigger.
But in either case, 737-900's replacing 757's is not a loss in seats (weird, I agree). We can both remember a time when a 737 was just a little plane to fit below the 727 in the fleet, but a 737-900 vs. a 757 is actually a slight increase in seats, I believe. Vs. a 767-300 it's a loss, vs. an A320, it's a gain.
717's replacing 50-seat RJ's is a gain, although some of them replace DC-9 50's. A loss of seats, but not a loss of pay.
At ay rate, I'm not trying to sell a rosy picture on Delta's future fleet decisions (no idea what they will buy), I'm only looking at what mechanisms we have in our contract to capture revenue, and what the language encourages or discourages. The current system captures some of the revenue from added seats, an LBP sytem doesn't. I think a system that makes pilot cost a constant per seat is naturally better than one that makes it a constant per airframe. And I note the industry has moved, over time, towards bigger and bigger airplanes. It's a confluence of physics, logic, and economics that drive this. They want more butts per flight, and we want to be paid for each of those butts. I'll make exceptions for some of the really nice tushies, the likes of which you see when you offload a sorority charter in Punta Cana before a 36-hour layover.