Tsgas: I appreciate your tactful response, and the acknowledgement that Lorenzo was a 'slime bucket'. I had no idea that you were there, and my comments were not intended to imply that I had any experience as an insider. Despite what has been said about ALPA (whether caused by Duffy's agenda or not) and no matter what major blunders were made by national or the Eastern MEC, old Lorenzo's main goals were always to destroy any unions (and indirectly, airlines, in order to enrich himself), even if they were trying to negotiate and offer some pay concessions. Lorenzo decided to strip valuable assets from Eastern and lease them back at very high rates, from what many of us have always read in the aviation press.
After he 'built' Continental, so to speak, by tearing up all of the labor contracts through his filing of Chapter 11, why was Continental then not a strong carrier? Based on the ever-popular theory that airline labor costs are always the main obstacle (or scapegoat) on the road to any airline's financial health, can anyone explain this, knowing that CO's labor costs were very low after Chap 11? Among the dozens of US jet and turboprop airlines which were created under Deregulation and then folded, almost all had very modest labor costs, from the beginning to the end. FAPA (later Air, Inc) did Salary Surveys years ago.
Come on gang-if someone wants to build an airline, does this person sell off whatever assets (i.e. Soda computer res. systems) he/she feels like and pocket huge chunks of operating cash, through vehicles such as Jet Capital, Texas Air Corp. etc?