Any "Latest & Greatest" about Delta?
06-01-2013, 07:13 AM
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Anyone know if Tech Ops is installing winglets on B767s for UPS? There has been a UPS 767 in an ATL hangar for weeks.
06-01-2013, 07:19 AM
No longer cares
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06-01-2013, 07:23 AM
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06-01-2013, 07:25 AM
No longer cares
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06-01-2013, 07:29 AM
Gets Weekends Off
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Position: Cockpit speaker volume knob set to eleven.
Posts: 1,410
This really shouldn't surprise anyone who has been in this business through a couple of hiring cycles. Nobody ever starts hiring while things are going smoothly. The accountants in charge always ignore the flight ops types until the wheels start coming off the operation. Next they'll blame it on increased sick calls. Then they'll finally break down and start adding pilots.
06-01-2013, 08:04 AM
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Not bizarre at all. We have had the mainline block hours shrinking a fairly steady 2 percent per year as capacity constraint became the management mania. This will be the first year in a long time where capacity is flat to a slight increase. As we move into next year the month over month increases become substantial in the second half of the year.
OK - Mainline block hours have been cut but what about the total passenger count for the DAL system?
I assume that DCI passenger counts have or will start to decrease but what does the picture look like if you throw in all of our codeshares/JV's/Alaska etc?
Basically - Is DAL selling less tickets as capacity has decreased over the last few years or are we simply outsourcing more passengers?
I don't know what the answer to that question is, but I am cautiously optimistic that either way the trend will start to turn positive soon.
Scoop
06-01-2013, 09:15 AM
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06-01-2013, 09:34 AM
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You know that those who continue the effort to test and repair Douglas airplanes are to be held in the highest regard. An average pilot can perform very well in a Boeing product. A god among men, after drinking his fourth cup of coffee, is required to demonstrate at the peak of his game to safely navigate the MD88, while running an emergency checklist, reading the MDM through hazy smoke & sparks, communicating to dispatch, the cabin, over riding the throttles and autopilot, staring at a blank FMC and writing an ASAP report for the previous leg ... just to get to Savannah.
06-01-2013, 09:44 AM
veut gagner à la loterie
Joined APC: Apr 2008
Position: Light Chop
Posts: 23,286
This really shouldn't surprise anyone who has been in this business through a couple of hiring cycles. Nobody ever starts hiring while things are going smoothly. The accountants in charge always ignore the flight ops types until the wheels start coming off the operation. Next they'll blame it on increased sick calls. Then they'll finally break down and start adding pilots.
More work -> more sick -> more sick calls.
But don't worry, next year...
[editors note: I'm not that pessimistic but I've also given up hope which makes one optimistic for even a slight improvement. Yes, my expectations have been effectively managed.]
06-01-2013, 09:44 AM
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Joined APC: Jul 2010
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Posts: 12,544
I think the decision to potentially run extremely thin staffed, well beyond just green slip cost matrix thin staffed but potential flight cancellation thin staffed, just to push off the very very very minor expense of padding the pilot ranks with 100 or 200 pilots will come back to haunt us.
Then there's the VAtl "partnership" which in all fairness could go either way but I'm very skeptical about it. Not to mention the insane AS code share welfare agreement that dumps 2X the pax onto them that they put onto us. On one hand we're told its only 9 pax per flight, but yet some flights need to be 50%. At least we've taken the first step and admitted there's a problem. We're also funneling many hundreds of millions of dollars into the war chests of future IndyAir wanna bes. Most, likely all, will collapse and go away forever, but we will have to bleed more than they do while it happens. Many have pointed out we're getting into a very tight spot with future aircraft slots/delivery needs as well as our currently anemic widebody fleet. And we've just committed to blowing a Billion dollars by throwing it at investors hoping we will get more in return but all I can see from that is we might get a share price bump from it, but we're guaranteed to be down a billion dollars at the end of the day.
Going forward, how will DL handle the many, many hundreds of growth narrowbody planes the "LCC's" are planning on unleashing against domestic capacity, especially when the mandate so far has been "preserve yields at all costs"? Then there's the fantasy foreign airlines that leach off of two sided subsidies while celebrating their ability to age/weight/looks discriminate with more fantasy planes on order than molecules of hydrogen in the universe.
We're doing a lot right, and I've said as much many times. But some of what we're doing is very short sighted and unsustainable. There's talk of some of those trends changing, but so far that's all we've seen.
Then there's the VAtl "partnership" which in all fairness could go either way but I'm very skeptical about it. Not to mention the insane AS code share welfare agreement that dumps 2X the pax onto them that they put onto us. On one hand we're told its only 9 pax per flight, but yet some flights need to be 50%. At least we've taken the first step and admitted there's a problem. We're also funneling many hundreds of millions of dollars into the war chests of future IndyAir wanna bes. Most, likely all, will collapse and go away forever, but we will have to bleed more than they do while it happens. Many have pointed out we're getting into a very tight spot with future aircraft slots/delivery needs as well as our currently anemic widebody fleet. And we've just committed to blowing a Billion dollars by throwing it at investors hoping we will get more in return but all I can see from that is we might get a share price bump from it, but we're guaranteed to be down a billion dollars at the end of the day.
Going forward, how will DL handle the many, many hundreds of growth narrowbody planes the "LCC's" are planning on unleashing against domestic capacity, especially when the mandate so far has been "preserve yields at all costs"? Then there's the fantasy foreign airlines that leach off of two sided subsidies while celebrating their ability to age/weight/looks discriminate with more fantasy planes on order than molecules of hydrogen in the universe.
We're doing a lot right, and I've said as much many times. But some of what we're doing is very short sighted and unsustainable. There's talk of some of those trends changing, but so far that's all we've seen.
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