One thing in our favor against furloughs is that we were never remotely able to meet net new hire targets for several years-- mostly due to simulator backlogs, and also due to a few waves of rather silly ship-jumping attrition - e.g. those new hires who got typed but were domiciled in the 5 bases, had big plane envy and jumped to the first legacy who offered a job, or, even more absurdly, stooped to the likes of Skybus. So at least that failure to meet targets put a little buffer in there, along with the 18-day schedule and other factors mentioned. Plus, I think the scale of the Obama stimulus, and the fact that Europe and especially Asia (notably China) will resume their past growth rates by sometime in 2010, will help pull the globe out of recession, in turn dampening the downturn here. By then the US dollar will plummet again but domestic growth will return.
All in all, long term I think NetJets has it right in that, like Southwest at the airlines, it has a tortoise growth strategy rather than a hare strategy. And like SWA, it is the 800 pound gorilla in its industry best able to weather storms, no matter how hated they both are by competitors who pay the price. Just my two cents.