i read this on airliners.net forum lets see what you think!
The cover story of Aviation Daily reads that Richard Branson is in New York this morning interviewing short-listed candidates for CEO of his US-based start-up. In addition, the three final cities for an operating base are Boston, Washtington Dulles and San Francisco, with both Philadelphia and Los Angeles having been recently cut from the list. The article mentioned that Boston, in particular, had been aggressive at courting Virgin, while San Francisco was most likely the underdog of the three due to weather problems.
Interesting overview. Any thoughts? Maybe they would be a potential buyer of the US Airways shuttle operation?
http://www.airliners.net/discussions/general_aviation/read.main/1341116/
http://www.airliners.net/discussions/general_aviation/read.main/1341222/
By: greekdude1 - 9th January 2004 at 21:38
Just in my opinion, not that I have any hardcore data to support it; There’s no way in hell USAirways is going to sell the shuttle. Some people on the a.net forum make some good points, but the botttom line is, the shuttle operation generates way too much revenue for USAirways. Why would they sell that unless they absolutely had to? Look what happened to TWA after they sold their Heathrow slots to AA? End of Story. I’m very confident that Branson has a “token” owner that is U.S. based who will represent the required 51% American ownership. How has he managed to run Virgin Megastore and Virgin Mobile in the U.S. to date? Slots can be negotiated at any of those prospective airports, I’m sure. It would be nice if they were in cooperation with United as some of those a.net posts mentioned.
By: tenthije - 9th January 2004 at 21:09
I thought that Sir Branson wanted to set up an all new airline instead of taking over one. The disadvantage of an old airline is that it already has established working patterns which may be ahrd to break as well as the employment contracts which may not be geared up to a low cost carrier.
I would not be surprised if Sir Branson bought stuff from USAirways. Slots, aircraft etc. I don’t think they will take the Shuttle to convert it into VirginUSA.
Sign In
January 9, 2004 at 8:57 pm