Goodbye Comair

In its hey day Comair was the place to be for both pilots and flight attendants, it had higher pay with a better schedule and a better contract, it was smooth sailing. As we discussed last week airlines are very concerned with there bottom line and trying to keep as competitive as possible and we will be discussing how this failed for Comair.

I would say that personally I have a special connection to Comair, being that my Dad has worked for Delta Airlines (who wholly owned Comair from 1999 until operations ceased) for over thirty years and ever since I can remember "Non-Reving" between Detroit and Cincinnati (where my Dad is based) Comair had been the only operator (until recent) so clearly I have spend several hundred hours aboard there aircraft.

Comair started operation in the spring of 1977 based of of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport flying 2 Piper Navajo aircraft on scheduled routes under its parent company Comair Holdings. As operations begin to expand and it was time to upgrade the fleet Comair became a public company in 1981. Further down the road Comair acquired a contract flying primarily the Embraer 110's/120's and Saab 340's as a Delta Connection Carrier which led to Delta purchasing a 20% share of Comair in 1986 and later purchasing 100% of the airline in 1999. Around this time things were going well at Comair, the company was profitable and continued to grow until March of 2001, when unhappy pilots went on strike over contract disputes and because of this operations ceased for 89 days when a new contract was agreed upon. This was strike one that led to the overall demise of the airline, the new contract had the pilots getting paid more than any other airline severely hurting their overall profitability. The next strike against Comair which is actually effecting all regional airlines is the rising cost of jet fuel and ever since 1993 Comair had been flying Canadair Regional Jets (CRJ) which is historically much less fuel efficient than previous aircraft that Comair had operated. Strike three that led to Comair's failure was what we had been talked about previously was the extreme competition that all airlines have recently started engaging in, because of the overall loss of profitability Comair just couldn't get there bottom line as low as the other regional airlines. The writing was on the wall for Comair it was just a matter of time before they would be shut down or sold off and unfortunately Delta shut down operations September 29th, 2012.

Overall the outlook at regional airlines could be grim primarily because the lack of profitability caused by this competition that we keep talking about. Bottom line is the regional airlines on there own are just not making any money and this is causing them to do the same thing that the majors are doing which is to merge, recently Skywest has acquired Expressjet who also acquired Atlantic Southeast Airlines (ASA) and Pinnacle has acquired Mesaba. These regionals are forming what I like to call super regionals so they can all be not profitable or barely profitable together. Of course there are other factors that are effecting the regionals which is partially the change of the way the the major airlines are doing business, they are shying away from the regional jet craze which fueled the hub and spoke style airline and instead not offering service in many places and just focusing on flights from major city to major city.

Finally time for the job search, lets see how many hours I am away from starting as a regional first officer. I selected Expressjet to look up and see any potential hiring and I found on AirlinePilotCentral.com that Expressjet is hiring with a minimum of 1200 hours total time, 50 hours of multi-engine time and they prefer a 4 year degree. Also, on the same website there is a pay scale, as a first year first officer a new hire could expect to make $23 an hour with a 75 hour monthly minimum so with a little bit of math-magic that comes out to a whopping $20700 and that is what I will do for multi-turbine time.