Originally Posted by
ande777emt
The widebody fleet is already stretched far enough, where could they find 2 772's or 744's to run a second EWR-HKG?
I know pre-merger CO's widebody fleet is stretched, but there's a lot more flexibility to shuffle things around within the combined CO and UA fleets, particularly as I believe UA is converting its handful of domestically-configured 763s for international use. Could free up some 777s on routes that don't really need all that capacity. Additionally, CO's current daily service EWR-HKG is very inefficient from a utilization standpoint. Sure, they do maintenance cheaply during the ~12 hours the aircraft sits idly on the ground in HKG -- but every day?
I think CX could easily beat UA/CO in both the price and service game by running a larger, more cost effective plane (in terms of CASM).
JetBlue had lower costs and better (coach) service and it didn't matter.
In any event, it will be interesting to see whether CX will charge $25k r/t for F tickets on the EWR flights.
The other thing is that these proposed CX flight timings are much more "efficient" from a business travelers point of view. The current CO schedule just wastes too much time, in both directions. I think if CO does nothing, they could potentially lose some lucrative J traffic.