Don't see anything there I would disagree with. The regionals, even the wholly owned ones - are capable of negotiating contracts that are sufficient to cover payroll to staff their operations. That's, um, how running a business works. At the moment, I'm sure most of them are baking into the cake that they will be paying more for pilots going forward. Of course, they don't want to - which is why their PR teams work to place "pilot shortage" pieces in the media.
I have a reason to believe that the piece that pilot wrote doesn't exist by itself in a vacuum, but is rather a part of a PR campaign to set the ground for negotiations. Between, perhaps, the ALPA, and, who knows, maybe United. Hence there isnt much to discuss.
The legacies have a very interesting way of matching and raising each other's bets. One legacy owns a regional - why not go farther. The regional airline industry is changing and I believe will be very different in the upcoming years, but it's the trial and error that will establish the final look.
That aside, I wrote a paper On a very successful (for it's day) charter company in Ukraine. They would run 737 to vacation destinations seasonally, and the return trip fare was $60-80 per seat vs $200-250 the competition charged.
The way they made it work was to sell blocks of seats to tour operators (anyone remembers those?), foregoing the bigger margin per seat, but also eliminating the risks and associated marketing expenses in the days when 60% loads were the goal. The kicker is, they were successful for only as long as they were the only ones doing it and were competing with "normal" airlines.
In a way that's what the regionals are doing right now. Problem is, as mentioned above, while that's a reasonably safe way to stay in business, it doesn't promote any kind of healthy competition since the only way to compete is by being cheaper than the next guy so that the shareholders of the partner major stay happy.
That's unhealthy on grand many levels.
The customer is stripped of choice. Buying a ticket to the boonies and wanting to stay on United (AA/Delta) for miles, he's basically fed that regional, the equipment and service that comes with it.
Normal codeshare would be a much healthier way - have the airplane with the actual company's name painted on it, ability to sell Delta/United/Turkish ticket to the destination and vice versa - the fact that without trying the airline can go tango uniform tomorrow, and not in the five years when the cpa renewal is due, would make the air travel better. Same principle as "we are too big to fail" being unhealthy for the legacies. Yeah you can. Run late hard and long enough, treat pax like crap and outsource the customer service to India and see what happens.
Whatevs though, what do I know, I'm just a bizjet right seat driver.
