The recurring weakness in business plans like these is always the scheduling constraints. An East Coast roundtrip uses up one aircraft-day so in theory you can fly a daily rotation with a single aircraft. In practice it’s not like that, something bad will happen sometime to disrupt the schedule and you will be in deep trouble.
Maybe with three aircraft and a single route they are thinking about two daily roundtrips and a backup aircraft. That would give average daily block time across the fleet of about 10h – not a lot to be making money with.
Then – how do you schedule two daily roundtrips? There’s a lot of high-yield demand for a daylight Eastbound but that needs overnighting the aircraft at both ends – takes up two aircraft for a single roundtrip. Otherwise you can separate the Westbounds by maybe four hours – say 1100 and 1500 departures – but the Eastbounds would have to leave NYC within a couple of hours of each other at maybe 2000 and 2200, both chasing more or less the same market segment.
Still – What do I know? Spurlock was BA Director of Strategy, so he’s obviously several steps ahead of me.