Another bid to buy Midwest Airlines?

[pilotmyf]

Do you guys (Airtran) have any Elton John planes left? I don't care who you work for, that was dumb.

 

[FlyWolf]

AAI offer to buy Midwest was $6.625 plus .5884 of AAI stock price

AAI today closed at $12.88

So 12.88 X .5884 = 7.578

7.578 + 6.625 = $ 14.20 which is higher than $13.25, anotherword the offer is in excess of 400 Million as of today closing prices.


hmmmm.....I wonder what the BOD recommendation will be (even though I kinda have an idea) and how will the share holders react.

 

[FlyWolf]

I think a picture of Wisconsin on the side..and after the AirTran..place a banner that states 'We love the fine city of MKE!' We want to be the best care in air...Luv ya man! Cheers brother!

lol...

 

[AFcitrus]

Knowing most of the parties involved I find this hard to believe. It is not in nature of the guys on the MEH MEC as it isn't in AP's.


I agree, it seems odd that either party would act this way. This, however, came from a member who was at the meeting and talked to several MEH guys. I can only pass along his perpective on how he felt the meeting went.

 

[WRENCH]

Do you guys (Airtran) have any Elton John planes left? I don't care who you work for, that was dumb.

Simmer Down MYF! Or Airtran is gonna paint the Violent Femmes on A/C 79 and make you fly it on the last SYX flt ever.

 

[EX_CV580FR8Dawg]

Simmer Down MYF! Or Airtran is gonna paint the Violent Femmes on A/C 79 and make you fly it on the last SYX flt ever.

Isn't 79 gone?

 

[njcapt]

Halin' Texas, you're right, it would have been kind of a shoddy deal for an ATA pilot staple, but the Southwest deal didn't exactly work out well for them as I recall either. They lost a LOT of their flying, and exactly HOW many ATA pilots have been hired by SWA since that move? A pretty small fraction as far as my ATA buddies have to say.

Would you rather be stapled with a job and current growth ongoing or furloughed and looking at a regional again if you want to stay in the game? ukep.s. I'm talking about ATA, not MEH here).

Thanks for the analysis, Lear, but I want to straighten out any misconceptions about how the proposed AirTran/ATA deal was going to affect the pilots.

AirTran was going to get all ATA's MDW assets and have ATA fly code share flights until AirTran could add staff and equipment. The rest of ATA was supposed to retreat to IND and do it's little scheduled service/military charter thing. As ATA's MDW assets weren't needed, ATA pilots would have been furloughed. The staffing estimate for post-MDW ATA was about 550 pilots. At no time was any merging of pilots to occur. Seeing how Northwest immediately flooded the IND market with RJ's upon the announcement of the AirTran deal, ATA would have failed within months.

The SWA deal allowed ATA to remain in MDW (in much reduced form) and ultimately produced a seniority list of, imagine that, 550 pillots. Approximately 50 of the 500 furloughed ATA pilots have ended up at SWA, about the same number that have landed at AirTran (me included).

The only deal for ATA assets that would have offered any pilot job protection would have been the America West deal. Furloughs would have been the same but AWA was willing to capture the furloughed pilots, with longevity protection, and recall them to the AWA side of the fence as aircraft deliveries allowed. It would be interesting to see what would have happened if the AWA deal had gone down.

 

[Lear70]

NJ, you're absolutely correct.

However,,,

I wasn't speaking in terms of whether ATA would have been better off with an AirTran acquisition of the MDW flying, I was responding to Halin' Texas' comparison of the AirTran/Midwest acquisition to the SWA/ATA deal.

In other words, they're two completely different animals, and Midwest employees stand a LOT more to gain than the ATA pilots did with Southwest.

Hope that clears up any confusion my original post might have had in it.

c-ya

 

[Eagle757shark]

AAI offer to buy Midwest was $6.625 plus .5884 of AAI stock price

AAI today closed at $12.88

So 12.88 X .5884 = 7.578

7.578 + 6.625 = $ 14.20 which is higher than $13.25, anotherword the offer is in excess of 400 Million as of today closing prices.


hmmmm.....I wonder what the BOD recommendation will be (even though I kinda have an idea) and how will the share holders react.

What is the talk around Midwest now? What do you think your BOD will decide? Just curious. Thanks

 

[Flydaplane]

Posted this on another thread, but to answer your question, here is what I think...

Me thinks the AirTran MEH merger is a done deal
If I reflected on my career I would definately say I was not good at predicting the future...however, I think that AirTran has MEH wrapped up.

Why? Well I think Timmy hired Goldman Sachs to make himself look good by saying that they were trying to get a true value of the company. I'm sure Timmy knew at the time that Goldman Sachs was a significant shareholder in AirTran stock. They own over $22 Million dollars worth, something like 2,249,000 shares of Air Tran, according to Yahoo's finance page.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that he hired them to make himself look good to the people of MKE and the shareholders, but also so he could tell them the price he'd sell for (everyone knows that he basically tells the board what to do). So he walks away with more cash and at the same time makes it look like he put up a good fight.

Funny how in the press releases he put out he didn't disclose that Goldman Sachs was a major shareholder in the company trying to acquire MEH.

Anyway, I hope the additional $ doesn't hurt the future of AirTran too much. Hopefully, they'll still have cash to operate well and pursue other merger opportunities as well (Alaska?).