at6d

SWA/Hawaiian
AA goes away
Jet Blue gets AA east coast stuff

Who knows...my magic 8 ball broke a few years ago, like in 2000.

nene

Reminds me back in the day when posters thought Continental would merge with Are Lingus to form Connilingus airlines......

Zard

Everyone would have been satisfied...well, mostly everyone.

Smokey23

Any theories on why LUV is up almost 5% today? Can't find much on the biz news sites.

at6d

My bad. I was working my GameStop stuff and pushed the wrong button.

e6bpilot

Growth stocks, especially tech, are about played out.
The next big wave in equities is going to be value investing and post pandemic recovery stocks. Cramer and the mass media investing talking heads are already pumping it.
LUV fits both descriptions.

It's last "normal" quarter (Q4 2019) was off the charts good for EPS and operating cash flow despite having a good portion of its fleet grounded. Fast forward to 2021 and it just finished the year with a 3B dollar loss, but that's not counting the nearly $2B in government grants. It also has an amazing amount of cash on hand and a remarkably low debt structure with favorable terms in the debt that it does have.

Ask yourself what is holding back the US economy from exploding at this point? The answer is the same as it was 10 months ago...a successfully deployed vaccine and or herd immunity. While I do not think the economy is going to rebound as fast as some do, I have no doubt that there is a ton of pent up travel demand that is months away from being unleashed. Most of that travel demand is going to be domestic leisure/personal travel and business. SWA is almost uniquely suited to take full advantage of that scenario due to its fleet, size, cost structure, and route structure.

The ULCC airlines are also poised to take full advantage of the same trend. The problem with them is scale. Their route structure is thin and they only have limited capacity to deploy. That's why they are hiring now and pushing expansion plans ahead. I have no doubt that they are also going to do very well, though. I think SWA, DL, and all of the ULCCs will be cash positive by Q3 and may even eek out a profit for the year.

e6bpilot

And I don't think anyone in the front office in Dallas is laughing at the ULCCs. They are minting money. As they grow, though, their costs will grow with them.
It's easy to run thin, upcharge your customers, and underpay your workforce and make money. At some point, though, you have to go beyond flying from little airport to leisure destination because you will run out of customers if that is your only play.
Spirit is already realizing that it isn't that easy to compete in airline hub to hub operations. Your costs skyrocket and the legacy airlines will think nothing of taking a loss for a few quarters on a route in order to fortify their hubs.

WHACKMASTER

So you’re saying we’re merging with Spirit?

Tjamaica

Delta Southwest Spirit are the US carriers to make the list of Fortune: World’s Most Admired Companies

https://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies/2021/

acecrackshot

If you are a Southwest pilot, this is one ironic post.

Personally, I think that WN is focusing on specifically United's market share in ORD/IAH/DEN.

For NK, there are some significant differences, namely a significant international presence that could potentially increase that is a significant yield generator. I think you'll soon see NK increase the frequency on its existing city pair, just like WN did in the early 1990s.