Call me crazy. I enjoy the General. If you have the time to drop the torches and pitch forks you may learn something.
I hate to be inflamatory, but I'm with you. Why do people take him so personally? They say they ignore him but it's obvious that they don't.
BTW, regardless of the General's personal take on this issue, it is a key issue in our industry. If you've got a personal stake in the success of your regional airline, so be it, but it doesn't change the facts or the way Major airline managements operate.
If anything, regional guys should really be concerned with this. There is a significant fuel efficiency factor that favors going with the majors. Don't believe me? Let me show you an example (if the figures are slightly off forgive me, but I'll try to be as accurate as possible):
CRJ-200: roughly 3000 lbs per hour, about 50 seats
737-800: say 5500 lbs per hour and 150 seats.
9 CRJS on a 1 hour leg: 24,000 pounds burned
3 737s on the same leg: 16,500 pounds burned.
Same number of seats in either case.
7,500 pounds is about 1100 gallons ($2.50 per gallon)
Total Savings: $2750
You can argue as much as you want about the loss of revenue (as if they're having a hard time breaking 80% on the majority of flights now days), and the cost of labor (the gap between Majors and Regionals has seriously shrunk in the last few years, want examples? Maybe you can provide them on your own). These things are no longer compensating for the fuel savings of going large, and thus things are changing, starting with Delta.
You can get in a yuh huh, nuh uh, style argument for 10 pages, but if you want to counter this, please prove me wrong with relevant evidence, and we can have a productive discussion, I'm up for learning something new.
Bear in mind, I fly cargo, so I'm somewhat of an unbiased outsider here, but I'm still part of the industry so I'm very interested in what is going to happen.