US brings nothing to the table except it's partial merger with America West. US has decent TATL traffic and a fair amount of A330's, but UA kills them on all fronts.

it doesn't make sense for any airline to merge with US.

Who says UA is in the driver's seat?

Agreed and agreed - however, were that (awful) deal to happen, it takes CO/UA off the table :(, but it does have the happy side effect of consolidating the worst management and employee cultures in one convenient spot, thereby making it easy to avoid. Me personally, after the mergers thing is all done with, I would most like to see US as the poor homeless derelict airline (not that they aren't already).

I would find it hard to believe that they aren't.

I had no idea I had so many posts in the Box.

Nope.

VS currently is having a nice PE sale, by the way.

If US was a person, he would be the drunk at night that is so drunk he actually thinks he is sober. But when he goes to turn the key of the car he ends up dropping his keys and knocking himself out on the steering wheel.

I am not sure if that made sense, but it is hard for US to be in the drivers seat when they can not find the car with a flashlight and a map.

Here's the US/AA merger that makes some (read: not a lot) sense.

AA limits traffic in to NYC to O/D traffic. There will be a massive build up of the PHL hub. They keep CLT, shutdown LAS and PHX. They fire all the whiny America West people, and shift the planes to DFW and LAX building up those hubs. Oh yeah, and PIT is dead.

I cannot get the pda site to work on my Razr - I can access the site, but cannot execute any operations. It's probably time to upgrade my phone, anyway.

I've been thinking that myself, and while I desperately want a smartphone, I can't justify the monthly for email and data. I'm not important enough to be needed 24/7.

Well, I'm not sure which side I would want to take if the argument were: "Which airline has the most incompetent management - UA or US?" Granted, US is easily the worst airline in the U.S., but it didn't have far to fall to get there. UA was once a world-leading airline held in high regard (even overseas) with a decent balance sheet. They fell a loooooooooooooong way.

As far as who is in the driver's seat...my guess is it's whichever of the two actually has the money (or borrowing clout) to buy the other. UA dropping a cool half-billion+ in 1Q doesn't bode well for spare cash on hand.

Why keep CLT when AA already has MIA (and RDU/Research Triangle as a focus city)?

PHX/ORD/DFW/PHL/MIA as hubs with LAX/LAS/JFK/RDU/STL/SJU as focus cities would be a fairly decent mix.

So I'm at a crossroads...

I can buy two R fares for a decent amount of $$$ or buy one R fare, and one coach fare, and upgrade the coach fare with miles. I would put the R fare under my name for the 150% EQMs and the coach fare under my fiancee's. The only negative I can think of is that we would be on separate PNRs.

Thoughts?

As per the UA 1Q loss thread, I think UA's available cash as of a few days ago was something like $2.9B. Would I commit 50% of my chips (guess, no time to look up market caps) to go all-in and buy US? Hell no. But we're dealing with Tilton and Co. here.

Why would that be a negative?

I will be attending the Cavs/Wizards game tonight. Go Cavs!