CrippleHawk

my bad but perhaps your right but I do not think UAL will do that besides they got ASA now (thanks to Skywest)

The Duke

I am sorry this could result in you losing your job. That is the tragic consequence of all of all of this. Mesa is now literally forced to sink or swim with the CRJ 200 issue. Too many carriers don't have a viable plan right now for their 50 seaters. It is a major issue that will affect the regionals for years to come. We're first up to bat. We failed in China, but that was a great idea to shift CRJ 200 lift to a foreign market to supplement income.

Because CRJ 700s have more seats and equate to more lift, you can't replace every CRJ 200 with a 700. We are still working to preserve and possibly grow our CRJ 700 flying with United as well. Even CRJ 700s, as oil prices begin to exceed $100/bbl, become very expensive to operate, so I'm not sure that's the best long-term solution either.

Look at United all by itself in all of this. Over 100,000 employees 8 years ago. Today, south of 50,000 employees. United had over 650 aircraft on property 8 years ago, today they have 350 aircraft. Downsizing is a very painful reality for this industry. Mesa needs to downsize and re-tool its fleet if it wants to sustain its long-term existence. Most importantly, it needs to make sure it is more successful than United in doing this.

therapy

"as oil prices begin to exceed $100/hour"

?

The Duke

Good catch. $100/bbl (barrel).

Thanks...

FerrisBluer

deleted.....

H46Bubba

Hey I want two 50-seaters back! Actually it is 87 "projected" by end of 2011. Gotta use the quotation marks when you're dealing with DL!

nordo

The whole picture at Mesa looks pretty darn awful. The 50-seaters could have been supplanted, but for JO and his Hawaiian vanity project that has literally bled cash from a company that had more than adequate cash reserves two years ago.

The court settlement dollars alone would have put Mesa into the SKW pay-for-play competition, and the monthly cash bleed from GO! operations would have allowed them to likely work out a deal for more 700s. But between bad/poor cash (and every other kind of) management hubris with respect to Go! and Kunpeng it seemed just a question of how fast they could throw good money after bad IMHO. The faster they could get rid of cash seemingly the better job they all thought they were doing.

And to the commenter up-thread who said that a little more maintenance would have helped... it would have, but no matter how hard we worked, every delay was the crew's fault and there was no winning. D-0 numbers in IAD were routinely ruined by rampers who could not effectively communicate, did not show up to push on time or a galaxy of other things. Somehow when I would go in and out of ORD none of the issues in IAD ever seemed to surface with the same regularity, and the D-0 numbers routinely seemed to be better.

If UA were to somehow re-award 200 flying back to Mesa, which I think is unlikely, then it would probably be for even less money or as a stop-gap month-to-month sort of deal when they had high demand (holiday travel) and would be profitable for UA but not for Mesa. I think that Skywest and Republic will soon rule the regional universe because they don't seem to make questionable decisions and have an actual business plan.

iPilot

Buying not one but two floundering airlines with stifling competition and creating deep labor strife is questionable business planning at best.

rickair7777

I think republic and SKW may be headed in two fundamentally different directions...

SKW: Staying focused on traditional regional feed on the assumption that there will always be a market for that, although the contract fundamentals will be different going forward (more risk for the regional). If there continues to be a feed market, then SKW is well-positioned based on their size and finances, which gives them good economy-of-scale efficiencies and enough cash to avoid getting forced into a money-losing deal to keep airplanes flying.

RAH: Seems like they are operating under the assumption that the regional business model is toast and they need to position themselves to move into the real airline business. They hope to succeed by bringing regional pay and benefits (ie little and none) to larger airplanes, perhaps with a small override. Or maybe they just have a leader with an ego problem, and he wants to be the next Juan Trip (ala JO)...you never know with the owner-operator types.

The SKW approach assumes that 50-70 seaters will always be needed, at least to serve smaller towns...which is probably true. The government might get away with dropping EAS to a few one-stop-sign towns, but if cities with 100,000+ population start losing airline service the political pressure will mount.

The flip-side would be a scenario where mainline does away with small jets to focus on large cities/international, or scopes them in-house. This might happen if fuel gets ridiculously expensive or if mainline pilots unite (unlikely, cuz no one group could do it alone...they would scope themselves out of business).

CrippleHawk

when will they start pulling the CRJs out?