Management keeps pointing out costs, but the real isssue is revenues. Go look at the operating results and quite frankly DAL has always sold their seat miles for 1 - 2 cents more tha UAL while maintaining similar cost levels.

Basically they can charge more or have less price competition on their routes and it has been this way for decades.

I agree, but it's not decades, just the last several years.

Prior to the merger, UAL and DAL were neck and neck at the top.

Q2 2010 (When the UAL/CAL merger was announced)

RASM:

United: 11.96
Delta: 11.94
American: 11.14
US Airways: 11.04
Continental: 10.94
AirTran: 10.13
JetBlue: 9.78

Yield per RPM:

Delta: 14.05
United: 14.03
American: 13.28
US Airways: 13.11
Continental: 12.87
AirTran: 12.19
JetBlue: 11.93

Then FLIBS did his magic and we are still picking up the pieces. The business customers fled when the proverbial "pizza was made so cheap nobody would buy it." This includes both the onboard product and operational stats. "The flight sucked but at least it was late."

We have improved our operation and product drastically but the damage has been done as the perception as not caught up to the reality. Yet.

DAL captured business customers from weak competitors. That's not the case for UAL as it tries to get them back.

Regarding FedEx.

We’ve bought new 727-200s, DC-10–30s, MD-11s, A300s, 767-300s and 777s. The 757s are all used, as were the 727-100s. Fairly certain the Falcons were all used as well.

The 767 and 777 are all factory fresh except for a very small amount on each fleet, I think 2 767s and 4 777s. However, all were delivered originally as Freighters and are fairly new.

The 767-300s come from the factory with the 787/KC-46 Avionics.

Those answers weren't incompetent. Just because you don't hear what you want to hear doesn't mean they are incompetent. Wall streets big picture is 10 years ago until tomorrow. United's big picture is yesterday to 10 years in the future......finally!

Kirby told Hunter that he is not going to change his projected numbers just to appease him. Thats shocking to an investor, to me it means we are still confident in or numbers, you just need to be patient.

This is great news for us it means we are not going to be flying airplanes for wall street. The United investors are still making money just not as much money as the guys they play golf with who are invested with DL. :eek:

Just based off the confidence of Kirby and Munoz as to our numbers and business plan, enough confidence to tell wall street to pack sand 2 calls in a row, I would say United is a strong buy. And is up this morning.

Amen brother!

Okay well said, you’ve backed me off the cliff.

I am cautiously optimistic but UAL is down for the year, so nobody is making money on our shares, versus making money with AMR...

"This is great news for us it means we are not going to be flying airplanes for wall street. The United investors are still making money just not as much money as the guys they play golf with who are invested with DL."

I wish that all the UAL pilots could have been at the DEN LCA meeting recently and got to hear Kirby and Oscar talk, I'm a 25-year guy and its the most impressed I have ever been, by far by management at UA.

They spoke exactly about all this and Oscar said we will get beat up the next 18 months or so by Wall Street, the analysts, and Investors but he had prepared the board and institutional investors for it.

They both said things we have all said for years, you cant shrink to profitability, Smizek dug a deep hole that we have to fill, you cant give up assets(JFK-LAX), you cant run from a fight with LCCs.

They explained in detail what their plans were I won't repeat in a public forum.

But most of all Kirby explained how his job is to position the airline for the LONG term, its Oscars job to handle Wall Street. Kirby pointed out the analyst get upset when UAL is growing or taking back market share that was lost during the merger when the running of the airline had gone to the back burner.

He said what most of you don't realize is the analyst and the firms they work for DONT JUST OWN UAL STOCK, THEY OWN ALL AIRLINES STOCK INCLUDING LCCs. So if UAL does well at becoming a better, more profitable, more market share airline that means many others will do worse, the Firms don't want that, they want the status quo.

Let's just hope their plans works, it was very well thought out and reasonable IMO. I am more optimistic than ever in my 25 years here.

The idiotic thing wasn't their answers. They set themselves up for that grilling. The last investors day they laid out a 5 yr plan to match Delta's current profit margin. The insanity in that is that Delta is a different operation with more domestic capacity, they have a well organised, competent management, and they are still riding the wave of one of the most profitable domestic airline periods ever. United saying "we can do that too" is like the kid that is actively eating his own boogers saying he will be an astronaut.

We shrank when we should have been growing, we bet on expensive new airplanes to save fuel only for fuel prices to ease, we were perceived as inconsistent when we withdrew from JFK, shrunk LAX, CLE, IAD, and put our worst product (50 seat RJ's) on big business markets. I love my job here but we aren't Delta. These investors day questions were those people wondering how we were planning on being more like Delta and less like the United of old. We diverged further from Delta this quarter immediately after saying how we were going to chip away at their lead.

We also stopped shrinking our RJ fleet when Kirby axed the 737 order. So we still have small RJ's and more 170's coming. Delta shrank the RJ flying and expanded main line. We are trying to add to both. I agree with the investors on the call. It was your regional flying where we received the bad press and your expanding it? I'm afraid Oscar and everyone will be gone in management by next summer.