Originally Posted by
CPRich
In the context of buying a bigger plane to serve that one route with occasional weight restrictions, $6K isn't really that much money. List price on a 321 is $115M. That's $6K daily for 52 years.
True, but this is only one element of their costs. Think about lost revenue due to capacity constraints, additional meal/hotel costs which may span multiple days if capacity is not there to get people home the following day (would have been my case), lost cargo revenue, etc.
Originally Posted by
cedric
Keeping a subfleet that's less fuel efficient for a particular route doesn't exactly sound like it would be a "good" management decision. I'm not sure why you believe this is short-sighted - the choice could well be current aircraft, or none at all.
They are already running a subfleet for these flights. The Hawaii A321's are the only ETOPS planes in the fleet, they only fly West Coast-Hawaii. While they share parts commonality with the other A321's AA owns, they require specialized maintenance.
I wouldn't call the decision to use this plane on this route short sighted, they didn't have a lot of options with the 757 gone. The problem is they are not planning loads very well, and it's going to get worse as they add more of these planes to PHX routes.