flew with an FA that said they were told 127 booted out of OAK by March. There is definitely something afoot

 

Something is a foot alright. It’s called hub and spoke. We are not allowed to say such words. ICO’s. Intentional Connection Opportunities. The more they intentionally create “banks” of flights, the more likely the less RON’s in the domiciles. This is the beginning. If it’s a financial success, driving better revenues, it’s going create some more changes around here.

 

Like VSP 2.0?! 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

 

Sitting around the airport for hours at a time working more days for less pay. And no, they'll need more bodies for that, not less. Sounds like a bad economic decision all the way around.

 

Heard from a buddy today that he heard AUS is a done deal. Hope not…can’t imagine that helps people displaced out east get back to the western bases.

 

AUS would be great for all the displaced HOU FO’s. I would imagine it would greatly benefit the HOU and DAL folks. Lots of guys living in the Austin, San Antonio area will be happy if that’s true. I was thinking it would be MCI but more and more people are saying AUS. I see Delta is trying to make a run for AUS so I would imagine we will try to get as many of the new gates as possible but that what 4-5 years out?

 

Well you must be fun at a party!

 

I personally don't see any way AUS will ever be a base. It is halfway in between the two geographically closest bases in the system in a N/S orientation that regularly gets schwacked by a single line of thunderstorms. It is the San Diego of Texas. Actually, it's even less likely than San Diego because both of those super close Texas crew bases actually serve Austin. There are tons of departures and overnighting aircraft, but zero reason to base crews. It just became a maintenance location, it doesn't even have full time maintenance there. All these rumors are started by the many pilots who have lived there for a long time and are always super hopeful that they will get picked.

Stick with the usual suspects. STL and MCI are great mid-continent connectors with obvious infrastructure benefits. Trying to figure out the company bread crumbs is dumb. SAN has had more daily departures than ATL for a long time, but because of where it sits on the map, it has never gotten the nod. Same with AUS.

 

This place has a hard on for staffing bases based on RON aircraft. Makes absolutely no sense to me. My bet would be MCI…bit further from MDW and STL and we can pretty much do whatever we want at that airport.

 

Plus MCI has a brand new completed terminal with plenty of common use gate space and a heavily staffed maintenance location. STL terminal won't be done for years. Same with AUS.