> Of course, with the price of Jet A1, and heavy discounting, just about
> every airline is on the verge of failing. It's a crap shoot as to who
> actually will.
Although I'm sure fuel prices are lurking not far beneath the surface
of most airline troubles at the moment, there may be some "inside
baseball" going on with ATA as well. Apparently the last straw for
ATA (which has been a diminished version of its former self the
last few years) was when they got ejected from some kind of
partnership, perhaps headed by FedEx, through which they got some
substantial amount of military and government charter business.
But wait, there's more! The parent company of ATA has two other
charter airlines, North American Airlines and World Airways, that
continue to operate. According to some articles I've read, the ATA
representative for the Air Line Pilots Association finds it...
curiously coincidental to say the least that of those three, the only
one to fold was the one that happened to be renegotiating a contract
or about to do so.
I have a vague impression that a lot of ATA's small fleet was
leased. They've put a couple thousand employees on the street. A lot
of valuable gate is presumably on the market too.
Something tells me that the headquarters of several airlines are
ordering-in pizza and Chinese for people who are sticking pins into
maps and numbers into spreadsheets this weekend. The obvious
candidates that might see a chance to fill in coveted gaps in their
routes or increase traffic volume to meet demand include Southwest
(their erstwhile codeshare, which supposedly had been thinking about
making it more of a partnership or merger) and is also said to be one
of the few large airlines that are genuinely well off) and also
AirTran (which had made a play the last time ATA reorganized circa
2004) with or without their codeshare partner Frontier.
--Joe
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