General Lee said:
So what would you do? Quickly ask someone else to feed them? That is ridiculous. You would have to beg, and many airlines have feed agreements in contract form.(can't just break those contracts!) You are dreaming if you think you can replace that much feed that quickly. Your management guys would have to scramble to think of something, and an Indy Air type model might fit for awhile (have to do something with those planes---lots of them), and then every LCC would pounce on you. You might want to hope DL doesn't liquidate. You have too many RJs.
Bye Bye--General Lee
General,
You'll have to forgive me if I missed this being covered somewhere but I just did a Cliff Notes scan of this thread so here is this Ramp Rat's two cents.
Now, what would we do?
Well, XJet just lost 69 planes worth of flying. I would be surprised if butt's have not already spent a lot of miles in airplane seats between SGU and IAH considering the good relationship we've had with CO in the past, our IAH ops shutdown notwithstanding. And from my understanding that was just CO wanting a good cost on 30+ seat prop flying and us not wanting to add the cost of another fleet type just to keep the contract.
NW is looking at starting a regional to feed themselves. No reason to think if the price is right they wouldn't look at another regional to do the work and scuttlebutt has it that we have talked to them before.
Now, I'm going to have to dig to support this one, and while I can't find the article now, I thought I read on Yahoo Finance, that B6 is considering possiblities for codeshare/feed beyond their own EMB-190 ops.
WN has experiemented with feed in the past (Sierra Pacific if I recall flying J31's into SMF I think it was?) and no reason to think they won't entertain it in the future. I think we may have talked them in years in the past about doing this for them but obviously, it didn't pan out.
There could be a few other opportunites I'm missing or forgetting about, but that's a good start. And while if all of these opportunites were to actually happen, I'm not sure it would absorb our whole DLC fleet. If none of them happend, I'm sure anything not switched over to UA would get parked in Marana/Mojave/Victorville/Kingman and furloughs would follow.
And yes if DL goes CH 7 (which I hope they don't) and an opportunity presents iteself, we can replace feed that quickly. We did it when Mesa got the boot from the UAX program in '98. Yep it was tough, yep there were growing pains, but we switched on a UAX op for the whole west coast from SAN to SEA in about six months including getting Embrear to fire up a mothballed production line to whip out a bunch of new Bro's for us to do the job.
So there you go. Best case and worst case. I think we would still survive and it wouldn't be the end of the world but I'm sure it would suck for a while.
Sorry if you feel that you've been taking it in the shorts for us. I won't try and salve your wounds our justify our success. Personally, I think many of the majors have been following an unsustainable business model for far too long. I won't blame it on labor costs, fuel costs or anything else. The major's problem is about more than just that but my opinion is that the majors haven't been in a position to be nimble enough to adjust to the rapidly changing aviation world.
Sad part is, for you guys, I thought Song was a step in the right direction. Glad to see you guys will be keeping some of the best parts that made Song popular.
But hey, I'm just a ramp rat slinging bags and dumping lav's while trying to raid the piggy bank for some flight time. What do I know.
Best,
OORamperpilot
(Edit, too many bags, brain...a pile...of goo....)
P.S. Almost forgot. While I think a lot of us wished Indy well, I don't think they stood a snowball's chance in hell and therefore I think it would be a cold day before Ron and Jerry tried to do something like with any assets that might potentially be idled. Jerry know's all to well how much it costs to fly an RJ solo.
