Repooc17

Copa on its 7M9 (737 Max9).

2-2 16 seats total.

chrisl137

A) I've flown B6 transcon in Y, and it's not comparable to AS in F.
B) If you were a regular AS flyer, you'd be MVP or higher and have probably paid less than $150 for a one way transcon that you knew got you a 50 to 95% chance of an upgrade to F, depending on whether you're MVP vs MVPG vs MVPG75K.

sfozrhfco

The people that are looking for free upgrades--which is why AS is just not going to go out of their way to invest in a new product. They are fairly risk averse as it is. They are very strong in SEA but from California they have very little pricing power on longer flights. The days of making tons of money to HI are also over given the rapid rise in competition. Other carriers have far more service to BOS/NYC/FLL/MIA, etc. I think given the choice between investing in a premium lie flat product and dropping most of these premium markets from California all together, they would drop them if they couldn't make money with their existing offering. In any event, it doesn't matter much. If you want something better, there are many other options. If the AS model works for others, they will go with that. No airline is going to be everything to everybody so it is good to have options.

OhDoctor

UA had planned to roll out 737s with lie flats in 2-2 before COVID. I don't know what the status is now.

OhDoctor

is the market for transcon MVP + AS flyers looking for their likely upgrade really a bigger slice of the market than potential revenue J customers for a route like SEA-JFK? if you tell me it is, i'll take your word for it, although i wouldn't base that entirely on *well that's what AS is doing, so that makes it true:".

jsguyrus

Copa has 16F, 24PE, 126Y
Alaska has 16F, 24PE, 135Y

Those lie flats reduce the seating on the 739M by 9 coach seats. That's a lot of potential revenue to give up if you cant fill all 16F seats with paying customers.

jsguyrus

The point is that Alaska has a fleet 20% the size of AA and cant dedicate a small inflexible number of aircraft to a route or two that they fly only a few times a day. Just for fun I looked at a couple random days in March, Jet Blue doesn't even offer non-stop JFK-SEA service at all on those days.

tphuang

One could argue that with reduced business travel and increased focus on leisure, this is the absolute worst time to try lie flat on transcon routes. All these lie flat seats are going for under $1000 R/T between South Florida and LAX.

sfozrhfco

They are not going to have a different product for one route. Soon AS will be a member of OW and people can take AA on premium routes or they can just forget about AS all together if their product or route network does not work for them.

Of course there are far more MVPs looking for free upgrades than people willing to pay full fare. That is true with every airline. If every frequent flyer were paying full J fares on every flight, there would be no need for flyertalk😀.

ashill

I don't know specifically about 737s, but plenty of airlines run lie-flats on 757-200s (exact same cabin diameter as a 737, or 727 or 707 for that matter, and 17 feet longer than the 739) and A321s (6" wider). Obviously could be done without much trouble.

Yup, that's the core point. The revenue premium would have to be pretty large to offset the loss of capacity (even if they can only sell the F seats as coach tickets and fill them with upgraders) and fleet flexibility.

Yeah, although I wouldn't take current schedules as representative of anything, either what's likely to actually fly in March or "normalcy". But frequency is a good point: in normal times, what does AA offer, 10x daily LAX-JFK and 5x daily SFO-JFK? AS never came close to those frequencies, did they? That just makes the subfleet they'd need smaller and therefore more difficult to operate. If you only have 10 planes in a subfleet, you can have exactly 0%, 10%, or 20% of your capacity as spares. 0% isn't enough, and 10% is awfully expensive, while still just one plane so not enough to have a spare where you might actually need it. Or else you don't have spares, and you risk having to sub in a regular plane for the people who paid the giant revenue premium you wanted for the lie flat bed in the first place. Any way you slice it, that doesn't sound like a great business case. B6 has a decent-sized Mint subfleet largely by flying Mint to a lot of destinations.

Unionruler

I hope you're aware that most airlines in the world have fleets <20% the size of AA-- some notable examples would be SQ, CX, KE, AY, SV, list goes on.

Eastbay1K

When SQ takes my sleeper seat away when flying SFO/SEA, I'll complain. I doubt people would complain if SQ took away lie flat seats on its robust domestic flight network. (I was about to make a joke regarding CX, but then remembered that 30-ish years ago, I flew CX SFO/YVR.)

ashill

CX had a dedicated subfleet for the SFO-YVR flight, right?

williwaw

I think lie-flat for AS makes about as much sense as starting ANC-Japan routes, but....

If AS is dropping the Airbus fleet with the new 737MAX except the A321neos, there is your subfleet.

jsguyrus

And how many of those are flying US domestic transcons with lie flat seats??