I think you're having a problem differentiating the term "mainline route" from current mainline aircraft.

Your straw-man argument came charging into battle when you mentioned 737's.

 

Who says DAL would have to fly it with a 737? Why not a 717? Why not a 190, provided DAL were to add it to it's fleet? The fact that it is a DL coded flight means it's mainline, right now it just so happens to be outsourced.

 

Negative!

I'd consider a mainline route to be a city pairing that is or once was served by mainline crews. Also, any route that is served by a CPA carrier at the request of a mainline carrier. SkyWest, Republic, Horizon, PSA... none of these companies did the market research and decided operating into BTM or CPR was a good idea. That was done by UAL/DAL/AAG/Alaska.

A mainline aircraft is just that. An aircraft operated by mainline. At present, the smallest of which seems to be the 737/319/E190/MD80 types. The moment a mainline carrier buys a new type, it's a mainline aircraft. What we have at present is a bunch of mainline routes being flown by regional pilots in aircraft operated by regionals. There's nothing preventing a mainline carrier from purchasing some E175's or CRJ's and operating them with mainline pilots.

The whole thing is just semantics, used by management to excuse the sub-standard pay and quality of life that is experienced by those working at contract carriers. The point of my earlier post was to illustrate the fact that "regionals" are nothing of the sort. Contract carriers are flying long domestic routes that are on par with their mainline counterparts. This is problematic from a compensation and career advancement point of view.

 

Also of note, the Cseries 300 is scheduled for its first flight in 2 days and is supposed to start deliveries within the next year. Who is republic supposed to operate it for??

 

It'd be ideal on lots of Alaska routes out of SEA and no scope issues?

GF

 

There is definitely as cost advantage to the regional model, but I'm left wondering how much of an advantage it really is.

For example: SkyWest in 2013 had $59 million in profit on revenue of $3.3 billion. There's a 1.78% return. For this privilege, their mainline partners are willing to pay for all of the associated costs of having a management team and administration teams in place to run this company. So essentially, if you were to remove the senior and middle management and erroneous admin personnel, and push the aircraft over to the mainline certificate, you'd be saving quite a bit of money. You'd lose out on the hourly rate for the crews, but considering it would most likely go very junior, once a pilot had adequate seniority, they'd bid over to an existing airframe... so the years on the payscale past the first few would likely be unused.

There's a definite break-even point, and the margin is pretty close as it is. If the staffing at regionals gets bad enough, we might see someone try to find out exactly how much it costs...

 

Delta's net income for 2014 was only 1.7% of total Revenue. So, does that mean they should close those doors too?

 

I absolutely agree. Given an endless supply of cheap labor, they have no reason to change. In an environment where entry-level people are looking for incentives beyond "They offered me a job!" to pick a regional to work for, a little creativity might be in order.

You've missed the entire point. The point was regarding low profit margins as they're correlated to how much revenue a smaller aircraft can generate, when compared against the costs of erroneous management teams at companies that don't really need to exist.... not about the low profit margin of the airline industry in general.

 

You left out quite a bit.

Mainline benefits
Mainline FAs
Mainline mechanics
Mainline tampers
Mainline ground support

Many years ago, AMR offered the APA the CRJ-700s that were going to Eagle if they could make it cost neutral. The pilots could, but they couldn't get the rest of he above mentioned groups to.

 

Scope is a mouthwash.

Legacy execs take a swig, gargle, rinse and spit it out.

It then contains germs.