Carrying 50% fewer passengers.

At a nominal $3 per gallon you are carrying 50% more passengers on every trip for an incremental cost of $9000 per day.

https://i.ibb.co/wJYDXvc/AE4728-AE-5...-AE66-E235.jpg

Given the fixed costs of a second fleet in training, sims, parts and maintenance logistics, I’m not sure a $9000 a day fuel savings actually justifies the second type and outside of one FA, there are really no personnel savings. Well, a couple bucks an hour on the A220 vs A320 pilot rate I guess. I suppose you could make the case for ONLY flying the A220, but any airline having a fleet of 300 or so of those is well in the future whereas NK and B6 both have an order book of 320 variants lined up and a sunk investment in existing spares and training.

Where are you getting 50% fewer passengers? B6 A320s carry 162 and their A220s carry 140.

Airbus Company literature:

https://i.ibb.co/GvmRLhq/1-E4-DCB28-...8-C99-EFE7.jpg

But yeah, if it’s 220-300s it’s a comparable load to a 319. Still don’t know if it’s worth the training and logistics costs of going two fleet though. And again, nobody is going to have a huge fleet of A220s any time soon.

Now do the A319NEO. Who is going to have huge fleets of those?

Arguments like this is why people believe pilots are stupid.

1. What’s the parts, maintenance, and training commonality between the 319 and the rest of the 320 series?
2. What’s the parts, maintenance, and training commonality between the A220 and the BULK of the JetBlue fleet which IS A320s, and will be even moreso 320 series if/when they complete the acquisition of NK?
3. And, as I said, the 319NEO orders are convertible to 320NEOs easily enough at this stage.

Arguments like yours are why management believes pilots know nothing about running an airline.

You do a great job of proving their point.

Delta probably has 60-70 A220-100/300s by now with more on the way with a recent bump-up order at Farnborough. I personally think Robin is lobbying hard for Airbus to kickstart the A220-500 (stretched version with even better CASM) program but the industry press is saying that Airbus likely won’t officially launch it until 2024/2025. I could see Robin angling to be the A220-500 launch customer in a few years.

As someone who has also flown on the JB A220 as a pax several times, I can personally vouch for it from the passenger ergonomics standpoint. Much better than any current Spirit offering and more comfortable than any non-MINT JB product. Perhaps JB will get more 220s through a possible future Breeze merger…

I will just add that JB already has an A220-300 program up and running. That horse is already out of the barn. The A220-300 does have better economics than an A319NEO, and there may be many routes that don't need the capacity of an A320NEO.

But I also think you fail to look just a little further into the future, with the inevitable launch of the A220-500, which will have been economics than the A320NEO with similar capacity. With a future fleet of 600+ aircraft, they can have two fleet types if they want, and probably works out better for some/much of the pilot group to spread out seniority a little bit.

I struggle to see a role for the A319 in the fleet 3-5yrs post merger. I would be very very surprised if the 319neo was ever delivered to NK/JB.

The A220-500 will be a workhorse and no doubt we see it replace a lot of our current A320ceo capacity.

The most economical variant of any given airframe is the one that holds the most pax. A321 vs A319, A220-500 vs A220-100

If Spirit takes a A319NEO before the merger, maybe. But there is NO way JB takes a A319NEO if none are in the combined fleet.