Originally Posted by gloopy

Yep, that's my point. 2 billion for CMR only to write it down to zero, another billion on a strike trusting keystone cop-like middle managers who kept saying "don't worry, we got it covered like a jimmy hat!", another 1.5 billion for ASA only to flip it almost immediately for 0.5 billion, and then the sheer cost of the long term FFD contracts for RJ's when fuel spiked and DL was stuck paying for leases and fuel for other airlines to bleed their coffers dry. Not to mention the massive over-ordering (many, many billions more, all paid for by DL) of so many of the soon to be insanely inefficient planes to begin with.

Then there is another decade worth of loss of operational synnergies as our brilliant managers flailed around carving up their hubs with their "portfolio concept" to avoid the effects of another strike even though by that time the entire industry was in full on race to the bottom, deal management an ace, pay for upgrade backstabbery. The half of the flying that is the mainline group is told how critical it is to hurry up and harness those synnergies yet the other half that is the regionals are forced separate with extreme prejudice. That cost is much harder to put a price tag on, but having so many little virtual airlines carving up every single city pair with no synnergies or operational integrity has to be expensive.

And DL pays for it all, 100%, including the long term debt for these fake little ACMI air groups.

Not to mention the costs of euthanizing dellusional fare trashing competitors created with these very wasted billions, like ACA, Republic and soon to be SkyWest.

I'd say a very conservative estimate of the management blunders for the outsourced RJ era is easily in the 5 to 10 billion dollar range, and that's just at one airline and that's not even counting the bonuses to the little hatchet men who trolled their parent airlines so very, very hard, riding off into the sunset with vaults of money as their epic fail MBA experiment smoldered in the background like uncle Owen and aunt Beru's place from Star Wars after the Empire came looking for the very droids that were, indeed, the ones they were looking for. I doubt it would have cost 5 to 10 billion extra to over the years to operate RJ's at mainline, particularly over the last decade+ of contracts that still act like its 09-12-2001.

Originally Posted by tonywilliams

they came very close to having skw operate e170's for them in 2008.