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On 3/4/2003 6

26 PM DLFlyer31 wrote:
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On 3/4/2003 2

18 PM Tango-Bravo wrote:
No. Don't confuse AirTran's reasoning with the thinking of the cartel airlines. Whereas the cartel airlines are mainly reactionary in announcing new services (as well as everything else they do), airlines with a viable plan (FL among them) launch new services because a market with profit potential exists for the product they offer.
And, as 7.5 notes, FL did not suddenly discover an urgent need to serve LAX that "just happened" to come to mind immediately following jetBlue's announcement of LGB-ATL in a "bizarre coincidence in timing."
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Time to sound the ol' BS meter. Sorry, but even the "cartel" airlines don't plan most of their routes around where the low-fare carriers are. I can name many new routes in the last year alone that DL has announced that have nothing to do with low-fare carriers.
Trust me, this move is in part a reaction to JBLU. FL hadn't intended to launch these routes this soon. If FL wasn't in a hurry, why not wait until next year when FL will actually have its own planes to fly the route? Why contract out to a third party? How often does WN contract planes from 3rd parties?
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...so then it was sheer coincidence in timing that DL "just happened" to discover an urgent need, among other examples, to fly ATL-CAK with M80s in place of CRJs and ramp up ATL-GPT service within days -- if not hours -- of FL's announcements of these routes?????
And by a similar "bizarre coincidence" AA "just happened" to discover the opportunites they had been overlooking for years at LGB and MDW at exactly the same time as announcements of expanded service by jetBlue and ATA at these points of previous non-interest to AA?????
Let me try to sort this out... The fares offered by (profitable) LCCs are causing the cartel airlines to be unprofitable on routes where they compete. So the "answer" for the cartel airlines -- who say they are trying to return to profitibility -- is to start or increase service at cities where they had been unsuccessful
without LCC competition
after a LCC enters one of the same markets or increases its presence in same?????
Sounds like classic cartel airline "reasoning" to me. The same type of "reasoning" which led UA to feel they were entitled to ATSB loan guarantees -- after all, they had a plan to reduce their losses from over $2 billion/yr to a "mere" $1 billion/yr.