boeingkid From United States of America, joined May 2009, 101 posts, RR: 0 Posted (2 years 2 months 1 week 6 days 3 hours ago) and read 1789 times:
Looks like Allegiant thought that by getting 757's the FAA would just give them ETOPS, now they have the 757's sitting in a hanger. I think that they should put these a/c on runs like RFD-LAS RFD-SFB or SFB-LAS. Allegiant needs to go with what they know using underutilized airports. The move from SFB to MCO was a BIG!!!!! mistake and the airline wasted money doing it, I hope the same mistake is not made 757's. Lets not forget that half of the airports that Allegiant flies into have FREE parking and most of the airports they are the only scheduled carrier
Allegiant President Andrew Levy admitted they made a mistake by trying to get ETOPS at the same time the type was added to the certificate. That is why they are temporarily making money off the aircraft by leasing most of them to other carriers until they have approval to operate them. - "There are a couple of ways to gain the authority from the Federal Aviation Administration and what we tried to do was a very, very difficult thing to do. I think, in retrospect, we’ve acknowledged that was a strategic mistake. Instead of trying to get all approvals at one point in time so that on Day One we could fly to Hawaii, it probably would have been more prudent for us to get experience with the airplane and then go to the FAA. So first, get the airplane on the certificate and then go to the FAA to get permission to go to Hawaii after we’ve operated the airplane for a while.
But once they get permission to operate the 757s, they plan to operate them in the lower 48 only for as long as it takes to secure ETOPS. They still think they will start shifting them to Hawaii flying by summer 2012. "We’re hoping that we’ll be flying there in 2012 and hopefully that will be in the first part or no later than the summer of ’12. ......................I don’t know if we’ll do anything out of Las Vegas, at least early on..............But we are going to target some of our small cities on the West Coast into Hawaii as well as some cities that today we don’t serve at all, but we think service to Hawaii would be very valuable."
Additionally, he says they don't plan to stop at operating only 6 757s. It sounds to me like they will get Hawaii up and running then expand the 757 fleet to use in other markets - " ...we think that the opportunity for Hawaii is bigger than six airplanes. We also think that this airplane has great application elsewhere so for both those reasons, we think we’ll have more than six 757s over time. Some things that airplane enables us to do which would be of interest certainly to Las Vegas would be longer-haul flights to the East Coast, which there are a few markets we think would be successful.............additionally, we think longer term that there are opportunities to go internationally out of Las Vegas and this airplane can go about seven hours so it can get you into the northern parts of South America. So we do think there are opportunities to expand our Vegas service by bringing in international customers inbound into Las Vegas. That’s down the road, but we’re excited about what we think of as an opportunity that may represent."
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." - Mark Twain
Falcon Flyer From United States of America, joined Jul 2000, 1292 posts, RR: 0 Reply 4, posted (2 years 2 months 1 week 6 days ago) and read 1322 times:
Quoting boeingkid (Thread starter): Looks like Allegiant thought that by getting 757's the FAA would just give them ETOPS
If you listen to previous conference calls, they've pretty much said all along that ETOPS approval wouldn't happen overnight and I don't think their planned EIS schedule was overly aggressive. If need be, they could do more DOD and tour operator charters along with the summer European leases. While anything is possible, I just don't see they moving into the scheduled flying in the beginning. You might see the occasional substitution, but nothing large scale. Eventually, yes, there are certainly domestic markets that can support the 757s. They'll be fine, I guarantee the 757 buy was well thought out.
[Edited 2011-03-09 13:16:44]
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