Mr. July

Good analysis; hope this validates a financial decision I also made - and helps out those WN employees who have their eyes on the stock price. Two thoughts come to mind -

First, at least here at BWI where Independence is still putting up a pretty good fight for someone without much to stand on, there has been some pretty good discounting. Despite the overall trend to raise fares, I actually flew Q3 on some of the lowest fares I've paid in some time. I agree that the average fare is likely to go up, and think that your estimates are conservative enough to hold - but if it's lower than you would otherwise expect, I wouldn't automatically assume that SWA is just manipulating the numbers (that's more my second point, I guess). There have been some pricing pressures, which will make average fare for Q4 especially interesting to watch.

Second, as much as I would like to see the huge numbers that appear to be warranted, I don't know why WN wouldn't give some guidance to try to get the analysts more in line. In this case, couldn't too big of a surprise backfire - these guys may know little, but I'm guessing they have egos? Don't know if there's accounting practices (e.g. faster depreciation) or special charges that might get the bottom line closer to what's been predicted, but I would think these may come into play.