Batten Down The Hatches...

As expected, United confirmed the retirement of 100 aircraft yesterday -- 94 of their 737s and 6 of their 747-400's. No specifics on the number of employees affected, but a friend with UAL says he expects about 1100 pilots, give or take, so that would probably be at least 2000 flight attendants. And that's just the crews. Until it's known where their schedule reductions will be focused, there's no way to guess the impact on agents, rampers, or mechanics.

Unexpected, Continental was out the gate this morning with their own announcement -- 67 aircraft in addition to six already removed this year. They expect cuts of up to 3000 employees across all workgroups.

The most striking tidbit in CO's announcement: their CEO and President are foregoing their salaries for the rest of the year. Take that, UA & AA... Gordon must be really proud of Kellner right now.


On Monday, seven of the ATA carriers filed a petition with the DOT asking for a blanket waiver on dormancy restrictions for the various international route authorities they all have. UA and US have both announced delaying the startup of routes to China that they just were awarded last year, and there's some speculation that other carriers may be re-thinking service that they'd otherwise stand to lose if they were to put it on hold.

Case-in-point: if UA (just as an example) decided that they were going to cease ops to Brazil, they could do so on a temporary basis without risking the ability to resume that service in 20 months if fuel drops and the economy recovers a bit.

While we have open skies agreements with a lot of countries, they don't exist to some of the major South American and Asian countries. Personally, I think if you were awarded the service on the merits of a business case, you need to provide the service or step aside for someone who can. Oil prices aren't just impacting one set of carriers -- they're impacting everyone.