Yakattack

Meh. The "career expectations" issue is still a thorny one in my mind, but I'm sure we'll hash that out later. JCBA is the current focus. Overall I think this will be a good thing. The other day I was thinking just how painfully long a 6 hour flight back from the East Coast felt (I did it to myself), so I think it's safe to say that I'm fine with fences and my relative seniority in base/seat--not much heavy envy here. The big planes are nice to look at, but you don't get many Wrangell landings in them.

Honestly I have great confidence in our MEC so I'm sure that when the time comes they'll do the best they can for us. We can tell them our thoughts, but other than that, it's out of our hands.

Honest question for those in the know: Per the announcement on TeamAAG about combining the fleets, how much ETOPS could we expect to do in the NB? Probably some, but less is my takeaway.

PNWFlyer

Defense satalite? Reading the conspiracy theory blogs again? It was a comunications satalite, and no one knows why an almost 10 year old satelite suddenly broke up. Did something hit it? Guess you know best.

rickair7777

Right you are, it was intelsat. I heard about it via military military channels, because it did impact some DoD comms (they do outsource a lot of IP bandwidth, heavily encrypted of course).

It had some sort of technical issue that apparently led up to an internal explosion so no, North Korea didn't shoot it down.

It was eight years old, this type of satellite is supposed to function for at least twice that. And they are never supposed to explode, that creates hazards for other on-orbit devices, maybe even manned spacecraft.

PNWFlyer

So you already know everthing that caused it, great. Just like the SWA dutch roll, that was all Boeing quality control... until they found out it was damaged by severe winds.

rickair7777

WB's are nice if you can fill them, RASM tends to be pretty good but only on longer legs. They are not optimized much for climb/descent phase so they need to spend a lot of time at cruise to realize their design efficiencies.

NB's are typically a compromise design, in that they might give up some cruise efficiency for climb/descent efficiency since they spend proportionally more of their operating life in those phases.

5-6 hours West coast - Island flights seem like they might be kind of middle ground on efficiency, but that would depend on the design of the specific models which I'm not familiar with. HAL peeps probably know the answer to that.

Also in some markets frequency matters, so that can drive the math towards NB's, if the WB efficiency isn't remarkable on that short of a leg.

I wouldn't count out all of our current Island flying just yet.

WindWalker999

One of the big points with wide body flying between the West Coast and Hawaii that is often overlooked (but mentioned in the email, or at least the one we got on our side) is cargo. There are some very lucrative cargo / mail contracts that happen on certain routes that drive the financial incentive to run a 330 vs a narrow body without the space, cargo loading system etc.

There are a number of flights in our system that switch between 330 and 321 at seemingly random times with no noticeable change in load factor (have you ever seen an empty HNL-OAK or PDX flight? Neither have I outside of COVID). Usually all you have to do to learn why is to do a walk around and look in the forward cargo compartment!

rickair7777

I can see how cargo is an even bigger factor for the islands.

Yakattack

Not that I can hold it in my line award anyway, at least not the redeye-free 2 day trip version.

rickair7777

I despise HI return redeyes. Stay up even later than east coast red-eyes and then drive home in rush hour.

vaxedtothemax

Excluding the cargo aspect, you can run two full 321's carrying 360 passengers using the same fuel burn as 1 full A330 carrying 290, to the West Coast That doesn't factor in cargo, crew costs etc.