I find it much harder to motivate myself to post as things start to settle down at MKE. It was much more exciting during the drama of YX and FL.

Sometimes I find myself posting new topics/issues just to maintain some level of activity here, though I realize that the posts may not always be the greatest. :)

Just wait a few months till WN's plan for MKE becomes apparent and subsequently F9's course of action is revealed; motivation will no longer be a concern

I don't do a lot of flying on CO because of that very flight! I don't know how they ran that ERJ for that long on that route.

I believe if they upgrade it to maineline more than half of the year the ground crew would need to be UA mainline employees. It is a 10 to 15 minute flight wheels up to wheels down on a CRJ, the taxi time and saftey announcement tend to be longer than the actual flight. I can imagine once an A319 gets its landing gear up it would be time to put it back down.

I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about in the months ahead. With the wheels coming off Frontier, it will be like 2008 all over again at Midwest.

I feel the same way. Frontier doesn't feel like the hometown airline to me and it does look like history is repeating itself again. The big difference this time around is, Republic being very proactive in trying to stem the red ink. Midwest basically waited until the last moment, then tried drastic measures to survive.

Doubt it. DEN-MKE has way too much capacity in the market currently as is, and ORD-MKE is too short a stage length to be worthwhile with mainline.

I realize you're referring to MKE, but to us Coloradans, Frontier definitely feels like the hometown airline. Southwest has done an incredible job building traffic at DEN in such a short period of time, but lots of folks have a special affinity for Frontier.

I do agree with your statement about Republic being proactive. What you described at Midwest certainly applied to Frontier when Menke was in charge. The change in credit card policy absolutely killed them overnight.

Here in MKE, I think most people now realize there is not hometown airline anymore.

I can see why folks in DEN feel that way, particularly because the Frontier name was kept instead of Midwest.

On the other hand, is it still the hometown airline when the HQ is in IND?

HQ may have moved to IND but the vast majority of the employees are still DEN based.

If one subscribes to the theory that CO is firmly in charge at UA, you'd be more likely to see a bus replace Express on MKE-ORD-MKE. See ABE-EWR for an example ;)

What's sad is that if they do put a bus on this route, it will likely be faster on average than the flight they are currently running. UA's MKE-ORD is invariably:

1) late inbound from ORD
2) oversold
3) delayed back to ORD
4) missing a flight crew

I do this route at least monthly (three times in the last 4 weeks) and all three times, one of the above four cases applied. A bus would be an upgrade in terms of space as well. :)

There is also a sizeable operation in Milwaukee, including two maintenance facilities and a large call center.

But I can understand why there are varying opinions as to the definition of "hometown carrier." To me, it's where the airline's corporate HQ is:

http://www.frontierairlines.com/fron.../fact-sheet.do

In this case, Frontier is unique in that it only offers three routes from its HQ city of IND.

Skywest dba United Express seems to be notorious for irrops.

The funny thing is that I've had nothing but good experience with them on any of the new CO hub CR7 routes, the MKE-DEN, LAX to any of the various small SoCal airports, etc. Admittedly I fly MKE-ORD a lot more than many other routes but it's still amazing that almost 100% of the time something goes wrong with the flight.