Once again, we see one of Parnel's classic retorts.

Not one to deal with anything that verges on fact, his analysis consists of discussions with a few frontline employees and concludes that anyone that does not concur with his opinion is FOC. Brilliant. Simply Brilliant.

ACE's consolidated Oct and November loads are a matter of public record. 9b asms and 6.9b rpms = 76.7% load factor.

Capacity will increase somewhat in December, but only in the latter half of the month. Last year, they did about 4.4b asms in the month, about 14% higher than November 2004. That suggests ACE will produce about 4.7b asms in Dec 2005.

ACE produced a 74.8% consolidated lf last December. It's a fair guess they maybe able to increase that l/f to 77.5% this year.

That results in a consolidated 4Q l/f of 77%.

ACE managed to get casm down to 15.26 cents by flying almost 17B asms in 3q. However, they'll be hard pressed to produce much more than 13.7b asms in the 4th quarter. That'll force CASM, (including interest expense), up pretty close to 17 cents for the quarter as all those fixed costs are divided by about 81% of the asms produced in peak summer months.

4th quarter yields should be much higher than third quarter yields (20.3 cents), and probably a little higher than 2nd quarter yields, (21.2 cents). Lets say 21.35 cents, because there has been a fare amount of discounting during the quarter.

So, if you are keeping track, that results in a breakeven load factor of 79.6% and an operating loss including interest expense, of about $78m.

If you exclude interest expense as an operating cost, it's a 4th quarter operating profit of between $1 and $2m,assuming interest expense stays at the 3rd quarters $76m. That's an operating margin of about .1% on revenues of $2.25b. That's not much of a return.

If you exclude interest expense as an operating cost on WJ's side of the equation, ($13.9m in the third quarter), and add back in profit sharing, that suggests a 4th quarter operating profit of $33m, or a margin of 9.3%.

Obviously, no one knows what will happen in Dec, but history has a way of repeating itself.

We'll see what happens when they report in late Jan, early Feb.