United has one of the youngest fleets of all the legacy carriers, including nearly 50 Boeing 777-200 and 150 A319/A320 jets. Lousy old planes? :rolleyes:

United is looking to aquire.

By "refresh to CO standards", do you mean pulling economy plus, the first suite, and cancelling the $185 million IPP rollout?

Can't wait...


:shudders:

Wirelessly posted (HTCP4350-Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC))

No. Tilton is looking to merge; failing that he'll look to sell off parts, even if it means hacking the company to pieces.

That's not even a relevant comparison. US airways was on the brink of filling for ch. 7 at the time of the takeover. United is sitting on $5.5 billion dollars in cash, has one of the highest operating margins and revenue streams in the industry, not to mention the frequent flyer program worth nearly $8 billion dollars.

And Continental doesn't want to have a big bad airbus in their fleet? Bo Hoo, final decision comes down to which is more effective in fitting in with the business plan. And as already mentioned, the domestic A320 product is much superior to the CO 737 one.

United may be looking to acquire but they don't know how to build value in a company other than throwing their debts overboard. Wall Street knows which management team is better, and their address is at Smith Street.

United has 92 very old 737 classics
97 old 757's
and 32 old 763's
in addition to have 20 772As (The oldest with much less range than CO's)

Even their new planes, look at how ratty they are, many of which have paint peeling. its pathetic.

United also has lousy labor relations.

I'm with ya on that analysis!

THEY think their FFP is worth $8B, reality is a different story. UA's net profit margin last Q was 5.24%, CO's is over 6.15%. But CO's return on equity is more than double UA's.

CO's business plan is Working Together: Clean, Safe and Reliable.

more than doubling the number of fleet types doesn't fit in with reliable. UA's employees are not happy, and integrating them with CO's would be a mess. So, no, it doesn't make sense with their business plan. You don't need to take my word for it, Larry and Jeff both have no desire for a merger.

I can almost guarantee that if NW megers with DL, CO will be looking for a merger partner faster than you can say "Work hard, fly right".

all i know is that having been a 1k flyer when i lived in Denver I really don't like the idea of Continental merging with United. If for no other reason than the flight attendants are nicer on Continental.

Leave it to you to somehow make the case that paying down $1 billion dollars of debt in Q1 07 was a BAD thing.

[

How do you dispute the fact that their fleet is one of the youngest of all the legacy carriers? You're previous generalization of UA having a terrible old fleet of airplanes has already been debunked. Moreover, United has stated that they are investing $4 billion dollars in the next four years to make them into America's premium airline. Before you say it, yes the hard product has to improve (greatly) before any nice seats make it the leader for service.

Agreed.

This has nothing to do with the cleanliness of their airplanes, as it's contracted out to Swissair! United needs to do a better job with their employee relations, but that certainly doesn't marginalize their prospects for acquiring another airline. Mileage Plus alone, as previously stated is worth many billions of dollars.

All this crap about Continental being more inclined with investment banks simply becuase they are from Texas...Give me a break. United got $3 Billion in exit financing from "investment banks" too.

I've said it before, and I will say it again. I don't see how CO has a scheduling advantage over other airlines in any markets other than NYC. For the rest of the country, a connection is a connection is a connection. Take CPH-BOS, for example. The following airlines do the route in less time than CO can on at least one leg (and are better or roughly the same on the other): FI, BA, NW, LX, LH, and VS. Similarly, ex-SFO, the outbound flight on CO will be nearly 20 hours, versus roughly 15. I would suspect that the same might be true of many other TATL destinations.

And this doesn't even address the fact that CO doesn't stand a chance at competing on the major city pair routes (BOS/SFO/LAX/IAD/etc-LON/CDG/FRA/AMS).

Now, having a scheduling advantage ex-NYC is clearly a much bigger plus than having it ex-BOS or ex-SFO, but does it make up for all the other traffic?

CO's position in IAH is strong, too. Though they face TATL competition from AF/KL/BA/LH, CO's strength on domestic routes out of the Bayou City means that CO is the go-to airline for a large part of the oil/gas/oil services businesses. And these folks fill CO's premium cabins at fat J fares.

Perhaps the better question to ask is why one would suspect UA of having "one of the youngest" to which I suspect the answer is either Ignorance® or Delusion® or both.

Continental Fleet Age:
United Fleet Age:

For fleet age, check out this page:

http://www.airsafe.com/events/airlines/fleetage.htm

Numbers are from April 2006. Note that UA mainline has not gotten any new planes, and has none on order.

They have older fleet than NW, US/HP, CO. And with DL getting new planes while UA not, they may be behind DL soon, if not already.

CO's fleet is also getting newer, with some 733/5s retiring now and 33 737NGs coming in 2008. Then 787s starting to come 2009.

Tell that to the creditors whose claims were discharged (on the order of $20 BILLION).

Compared to what? NW? United hasn't taken delivery of a single new airplane in years. CO's widebody fleet is all <10 years old. The old 733s are dragging them down but those are on the way out, to be replaced by brand new planes.
If united is spending $4B to refurbish its planes that's great. Its about time.

If you think that UA contracting out their cleaning to SwissPort absolves them of responsibility, what planet are you on? If CO's planes were filthy with a contracted crew they'd fix it by getting them to do it right or firing them.

Interesting data that J.Edward posts. I'm struck by two things:

1. UA's fleet is approx. 10% larger than CO's. I thought the difference was bigger.

2. The big difference in the percentage of fleet that is widebody aircraft. Only 12.6% of CO's fleet are twin aisle birds versus 29.4% of UA's fleet.