I think Comair is a little jealous.....

[wms]

I agree with the generalisimo, Song is very good, i was shocked. It still looks old inside, but he is right, it is a thousand times better than Delta's usual old 737 and MD 80 crap.

It's a shame that to get the best product, with the best service ta DAL, you have to pay the lowest fare. If it really is profitable, they should expand that model with first class to the whole fleet. And make all of the current stews re-audition!

 

[General Lee]

Simplfares is more DAL smoke and mirrors. Go on line and do some comparison. On example is MCI to AVP, walk-up simplifare $1089. Normal walk-up fare on USAir $350. Simplifares works in some cases, but overall it has no more substance than "good goes around".

As far as which airlplanes are cost effective or not depends on pricing power. It's not sensible to fly 6 RJs on a segment when you can do it with 4 MD-80s. But it doesn't make sense to fly MD 80s into markets that can't support them. Have you thought about why DAL is contracting RJs instead of buying ML aircraft? DCI carriers have the credit to get financing, DAL doesn't. According to our ex-pres (his mouth to my ears, not hear-say), ASA secured our own financing and made our own payments. I'm sure DAL would like to buy planes, even some kind of 90-110 seater, but they cannot get the financing. But they need to have more planes to keep up. So whether it's a WO or the 7th DCI carrier or the 77th, DAL will get someone to to operate airplanes for them until they have the credit to get their own.

RJs cost alot per seat to fly. But "alot" is relative. We could fly one pax planes and be profitable if there were the pricing power, but for now there is not. There's no pricing power and no way for DAL to aquire more cost effective planes withouy hiring the flying out and that won't happen. So they are stuck with getting contract carriers to fly more and more RJs for them.

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

 

[Nindiri]

Why did you guys sell the MD-11's?

 

[wms]

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

The comparison was round trip, 3 day notice for each. DAL's simplifare is misleading because it's max fare either each way or per segment. USAir was $350 round trip.

You're right about DFW being a mistake. From 2001 until it closed it lost $900m, one of the LEAST loosing hubs. The failure was in not following through on the expansion. One of the uses for RJs is exploring new segments. Many segments over sold consistently and should have been upgraded to ML. MCI is an example. We flow 6 CR2s there per day with a capacity of 300 which consistently was over sold. AA on the other hand had a capacity of 1100-1400 seats per day, mostly over sold. We should have upgraded 2 CRJs to MD80s to see how that did and so on. I think that was the previous mgmts strategy(my own guess), but the grinch changed course. MCI is one example of many. We should have expanded many segments such as MCI, DIA, MSY, IAH, SAT, etc and more aggressively discontinued lacking segments.

The whole issue about who paid what for what is moot. Partly because now ASA belongs to another and maybe we'll see just how successful we are without DAL's "cookin'" and partly because there was no forth-rightness in their financials. Just fee-per-departures which are "renegotiated" each month depending on who DAL wants to look profitable. In the end it was all the same pot. Who knows, maybe DAL will make CA look profitable so they can buy new 73s for you guys to fly. But now the fact is DAL itself can't buy an airplane and must depend on DCI partners for expansion. Therefore there will be no increases in large aircraft at DAL unless DALPA allows someone else to fly them and they SHOULD NOT.

I would prefer to sit first class when given the choice, but the option is not financially available for the vast majority of travellers who can only afford coach. I used to commute from DFW to GSO weekly. I had a choice to fly first class on DAL, but I had to go through ATL. Or I could go non-stop on an RJ and be guaranteed an isle, or a window. I didn't need to fly first-class so much that I needed to see ATL, I preferred the over-flight on a DCI RJ. On DAL if I couldn't get first I would be stuck in a middle seat. If I know the flight is pretty full and I'll surely be stuck in a middle seat I'll take the RJ, especially if I can over-fly a hub. It would have been nice if DAL had flights with first class between DFW and GSO, but 40 pax don't justify an MD 80.

As far as the profitabilty of RJs, it all has to do with pricing power, and there is none at DAL. But with the right pricing power anything can be profitable. And that's up to the powers to be to make those determinations.