Mesa May Purchase Usairways

[usairways_vote_NO]

And that's not my cousin I'm dating - not my 1st cousin anyway....

Jim

[post="256635"][/post]​

Jim,

Did you mean not your 1st cousin or not the first cousin you dated. There is a difference.

 

[sandypet]

One of the things happening at US AIrways is de-peaking of hubs. You lose a few connects but airplanes, flying crews, and ground personnel spend more time doing their job rather than waiting. (suprise - you need fewer people, gates, & planes. Look at Southwest's gate utilization and compare it to everyone else and you will see one of the reasons they have the most money in the bank) Another change is less routing passengers through hubs. Would you rather fly BOS-PHL-FLL or BOS-FLL? This also ups average stage length which is a major driver of lower cost per ASM. Another change is making a choice between PHL & PIT. No airline needs 2 hubs in the same state. Given the fact that PHL has a large enough population to provide a good traffic base, the choice was pretty obvious.

Wolfe and Gangwal did little to respond to SW. Their response was MetroJet. There was a relatively small reduction in pay associated with flying the 737-200s. The airplanes appeared to be still scheduled the same way as the rest of the system with lots of time on the ground due to significant connect times. The cost level of MetroJet was pretty close to that of mainline. As a result, US Airways couldn't compete with SW on fares.

 

[mweiss]

Never mind...UVN beat me to it. 🙁

 

[usairways_vote_NO]

[post="256644"][/post]​

All that is too little too late as you said. Wonder how other changes that haven't been incorporated would go over? Like no first class, no bag tranfers, first come first serve zone boarding, one common fleet type, no international flying (over pond). etc. Point being it is hard seeing USAirways will ever be able to get close to being a equal on level terms with a LCC carrier and unfortunately USAirways is probably now in such bad shape it will never fully recover enough to even give it another run.

Again my reference to Wolf and when he joined USAirways was to say that changes should have been in the works way before him, of course there is a argument hindsight is 20/20.