Shake up at Jetblue

[clickclickboom]

Sure

Take a small hole and introduce a large dry baseball bat wrapped with fiberglass insulation.

 

[BILL LUMBERG]

Huh??

 

[jonjuan]

A solution, Bates said, might be for American to buy hundreds of 100- to 120-seat jets, eliminate its American Eagle subsidiary and take over the routes flown by 50-seaters. American could then hire the Eagle pilots. The per-seat cost would decline and passengers would be happier with the bigger planes, but not so happy with the reduced frequencies. "I'm hoping that's part of the plan going forward, although I haven't yet broached it with management," Bates said.

He likened any progress made toward the pilots’ goals to in-source regional flying to the B-scale tried by American in the 1980s and suggested it would only be temporary. “The B rates were also temporary and the changes being suggested by the pilots now will ultimately go away with time,” he concluded.

“This is a union sucker punch and any major airline executive who falls for it doesn’t have the scars that come with experience. Once the airlines have made the billions of dollars in investment in the aircraft and all the pilots have been hired on, the concessions will disappear and the operating costs will rise. That will be the future just as it has in the past.”

The regional executive who was instrumental in building his airline during the most rapidly changing periods of regional airline history, also pointed to the long-term capacity purchase agreements indicating that it would be a long time before regional airline outsourcing would end.

“That is so even if they wanted to do it and reached satisfactory contractual agreement with the pilot unions,” he said. “The regional airlines will quite appropriately and understandably assert their rights under the CPAs to continue the flying for the full CPA term. After all, they invested in the airplanes and associated infrastructure and would have nowhere else to place their entire fleets. As the CPA terms eventually run their natural course – some as much as 10 years – the majors will be free to drop uneconomic regional flying and bring what is left in-house; or drop some, bring some in and leave some with small niche players flying 50-seat jets and turboprops.”