Id personally like to see more Air Wisconsin and less Mesa aircraft in our fleet
I know this is going to sound terribly old fashioned, but what would be so bad about seeing your aircraft in your colors?
Back in the olden days.....some airlines published connections with each other, but they clearly identified TW as TW and AL as AL and LC as LC and MO as MO and TT as TT and BN as BN and so on and so forth.
When USAirways has Mesa, or Air Wisconsin, or Mom's Airlines, or whoever operate a flight for them under their code and in their colors......the customer sees the experience as indicative of USAirways.
However, USAirways lacks one key ingredient to making things work.....quality control.
The naysayers go on and on about how you have to have nonstops from Zanesville and Franklin/Oil City and Erie to a hub in order to feed the lucrative flights to Rome and Athens and Istanbul (not Constantinople).
I would argue that you are a whole lot better either operating flights yourself or not operating them at all.
And when you guarantee somebody a profit on a fee-for-departure basis, you have effectively removed any incentive for that carrier to do a good job.
And the routes that get downsized to the smaller code-share partners....sheesh. Before long I would not be surprised to wake up and find out that the flying from LAX to PHL had been outsourced to Mesa......a transcon RJ with a fuel stop at Farmington, NM. Bob and Art and the rest of the loyal FFocus members had better spend some serious time in the club before THAT departure......killing off the extra brain cells while trying to determine if the liver is a muscle or an organ. Yuck.
Bethune was right when he said that airlines were like food, and it was quite possible to make a pizza so cheap that nobody will want to eat it. And before somebody points a finger at me and says "hey, you like Southwest, you'll eat any cheap pizza you can find" I might suggest that my airline/pizza might be simple, but it is elegant in its simplicity as it is made with good ingredients.
Bottom line: airlines need to drift away from the code share/commuter partner biz. It's unhealthy.
