What does Apr'08 hire date buy u at SWA

[On Your Six]

You obviously assume a future mainline Delta maintaining 12,000ish pilots to fuel your progression. A junior SWA pilot might assume future growth due to expansion into many as yet untapped markets. Only time will tell...

It's called retirements. A report pasted on FI said Delta will retire 7600 pilots to age 65 in the next 15 years. SWA will be retiring about 150-175 a year for the next decade. Look at how young the Airtran group is, that won't help. And it looks like SWA is thinking about dumping the 717s when the leases expire, and that may get rid of a lot of your current smaller markets. As far as untapped markets, you have to realize everyone else has already beaten you to the punch, Hawaii is saturated already, Alaska Airlines owns the AK routes, etc. Going to Europe as a LCC will ignite a war not just between mainline legacy carriers and your airline, but also European LCCs like Ryainair and Easyjet that are just as strong as you, but already have the slots and infrastructure over there. Untapped markets are few and far between, and won't be easy to start without tons of competition.


Godspeed!


OYS

 

[StopNTSing]

It's called retirements. A report pasted on FI said Delta will retire 7600 pilots to age 65 in the next 15 years. SWA will be retiring about 150-175 a year for the next decade. Look at how young the Airtran group is, that won't help. And it looks like SWA is thinking about dumping the 717s when the leases expire, and that may get rid of a lot of your current smaller markets. As far as untapped markets, you have to realize everyone else has already beaten you to the punch, Hawaii is saturated already, Alaska Airlines owns the AK routes, etc. Going to Europe as a LCC will ignite a war not just between mainline legacy carriers and your airline, but also European LCCs like Ryainair and Easyjet that are just as strong as you, but already have the slots and infrastructure over there. Untapped markets are few and far between, and won't be easy to start without tons of competition.


Godspeed!


OYS

Since you apparently missed it on the first pass...

You obviously assume a future mainline Delta maintaining 12,000ish pilots to fuel your progression.