Itrade:
Your "couple of thoughts" are intriguing, so I did some research within the company in the marketing area.
US Airways has already looked at all of your points. The problem with some of the Mexican markets is that the local O&D traffic would likely be to small to be profitable and Continental has a huge advantage out of Houston and Newark.
US Airways believes the company has 8 good candidates for B757 transatlantic service, but the company prefers to use the B767-200s first. Interestingly, I understand part of the "Transformation Plan" could be to get (cheap/used) B767-200s instead of using the B757 sub-fleet, but the airline must fix core business first.
In regard to the B767-200s, Bloomberg recently reported that United is going to phase out its B767-200 fleet in 2005 and there are reports that RSA holds some United B767 EETCs, presumably part of the 174 that the Chicago-based airline told the bankruptcy court it was having difficulty renegotiating.
In fact, in a prepared statement United bankruptcy attorney Jim Sprayregen told the court, "We remain in a constructive, but exceedingly complex negotiation with our public aircraft debt. That group represents 174 aircraft in both our four enhanced equipment trust certificate transactions as well as a significant number of other public and older private transactions. The number of financial institutions with significant stakes in the debt represented by that group exceeds 100. There are issues regarding cross holdings of institutions among various transactions, between senior and subordinate tranches in public deals, different mixes of wide-bodied and narrow-bodied aircraft, as well as recent and older vintage aircraft among all these transactions."
Itrade, even though I do not understand why the company would want more B767-200s instead of A330-200s, apparently the company is interested in acquiring more Boeing widebody's and I believe they could come from United.
Regards,
Chip