Wait a second, the most one way on Simplifares is $699 for first class, and $599 for coach--walk up. The USAir one must be one way. Simplifares have increased First Class ridership, because now it is more affordable. Can that make up for high gas? Well, we added the extra $100 increase too late IMO (again--we were full all Summer---probably would have still been full with the extra $100)
As far as the RJ financing thing goes.....Who buys the planes again? Who OWNED ASA? We made a deal (we did) with GE to take extra RJs. We also had better credit a couple years ago, and Fred Reid decided Businessmen wanted frequency over room onboard. He was wrong, and look where we are at today. The DFW RJ fiasco is one major reason. Sure, DFW was not a money maker for awhile, but the transcon RJ stop in DFW drove away our best customers in Texas (lots of rich people there)---and we had to charge very low fares to even try to fill those flights. These flights out of DFW competed against AA MD80s, and they won. The ASA 70 seaters didn't have first class (rich people like upgrades), and AA did. Now we are competing against Airtran with newer 717s and 73Gs on some RJ routes. We will lose on those routes too--because the people we want most don't want RJ service when they could fly on a mainline plane (717 and up) with a chance to upgrade (even Airtran upgrades people). Hey, Airtran dropped their RJ service from Air Whiskey. Why would they do that? Now, the reason to have RJs is to fly them to cities that LCCs do not go to, and bring those people (for more money) to our hubs to connect onto larger cities on larger planes. People in Peoria don't have a real choice, so they fly our RJs to ATL to go to warm FLL or SJU in the Winter. We make money on those routes. But throw in some LCC service, and we have to dump fares and we lose money. LCCs are growing. And why haven't we bought any new planes as of late? Well, we now fly them thru ATL on opertaion clockwork, and now have gained more usable planes by just increasing efficeincy. Sure, it would be nice to have more new aircraft, but that is up to Delta and the leasing companies or the manufacturers. We had 14 MD-11s that were good, but somebody decided to park them after the Iraq War started, fearing that they would go unused that Summer. Boy were they wrong. We also could still be using them right now for new INTL flights that our LCC don't go to---buyt we had to sell them to Fedex for some other reason---we also sold all of the sim time (in our MD11 sim) to World Airways. Great--we made $1 million on sim time but had to sell the planes because they were sitting when they didn't have to be. Great. That was my decision too.
Bye Bye--General Lee