Sputnik

Eh, I think you might both have a point. I live in ATL, in a neighborhood full of business travelers. The reality is if you're an east coast road warrior based in ATL, your airline "choice" is DL. No one else has a network here that comes remotely close. And with a travel radius of 800-1000 miles, your "choice" is pretty much 88s.

I really do think if my neighbors actually had a choice in airframes they'd pick a C series (or anything with an entertainment system).

I don't think that is Delta's intent though.

Beyond that small caveat, I agree on cabin class and flight times.

forgot to bid

The better A346 paint job by Virgin was "mine is longer than yours"

gloopy

As far as I can tell, the entire point(s) of contention among us exclusively revolve around the extent to which DL (or any airline for that matter) will gain or lose HVC's because HVC's are spring loaded to change airlines to chase equipment.

While that happens to some degree, such as the novelty factor of people trying to fly the 380 just because its new and the biggest or whatever, to trying to fly a 747 because it'll be gone soon, as well as because of cabin differences is very, very minimal. So tiny that its not a factor beyond the sales brochures and MBA white paper level.

You asked if I knew or talked to HVC's and I have. I know several personally but to be fair I'd say we all do, as well as say no one knows enough to provide more than an anecdotal implication. But I think when you take a fair look around the industry you'll see that there just isn't massive customer migration, even among the HVC subset, because of equipment.

I think the highest we've ever seen that relatively rare phenomenon was when the RJ was new and replacing not only turboprops in general but really crappy ones in particular. Yet even then there were large networks of full turboprops for quite a while. Now you see that to a lesser but still significant amount avoiding the super cramped 50 seaters. Anything beyond that like I said may happen from time to time, but just isn't prevalent enough to matter in equipment selection.

DL still has plenty of Porsches picking up HVC's who arrived on an MD88, which is incredibly easy to avoid these days. SWA is doing very well too, and carrying more business pax than they used to. My point is that kind of product selection simply isn't a significant factor. The C Series cabin probably is better, but its not game changing orders of magnitude better to the point we'd lose any significant amount of customers to another airline because of it. To assume otherwise you'd have to come up wth some very specialized scenarios, like one airline puts CRJ-200 50 seaters on an hourly shuttle route while another company uses the C Series on the same routes with the same frequency at similar prices. OK in that case that probably would happen enough to move the needle.

But the C Series vs a 320...or even a cabin inferior 737/717/MD90/etc just isn't going to shift enough customers to drive a fleet decision. That's all I'm saying.

BobZ

737 inferior cabin?!

Whchya talkin bout Willis??

qball

If DAL (or any other air line) was worried about losing a significant amount of HVCs due to cabin comfort , there wouldn't be a single 50 seater left flying. Yet, on many city pairs, that is all they offer for a significant portion of the year.

David Puddy

This would suck:

https://www.reuters.com/article/boeing-bombardier-aeromexico/aeromexico-eyes-deltas-cseries-jet-order-amid-u-s-trade-spat-sources-idUSL1N1O41Y3

Obviously a ruling in favor of Bombardier in February (financial pain not proven by Boeing despite zero 100-120 seat option) would help avoid this.... Not the entire order - just a piece if Boeing wins in February.

Mesabah

Delta runs Aeromexico, so not a surprise really.

sailingfun

I would go read the flyertalk forum in the Delta section. They may not be representive of the majority of our customers but the pay careful attention to equipment and seat selection.

RiddleEagle18

So Boeing is gonna lose the 5.6 billion dollar Canadian fighter order.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-...ada-1512767566


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waldo135

Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. Painful lesson.