Application: Liberty Airlines

This is part of a package, along with Sunshine Air Taiwan and Gizme Airlines, who should theoretically be posting applications right around now too; I 'started' an alliance thinking noone else had lately - you guys have been awful quiet! Anyway, I've been asked to say that it'd be ideal for the three of us if you could accept or reject us as a whole rather than individually, although I can't exactly force you to do that if you don't want to.

I'm not actually sure whether you actually have any US-based airlines right now; Belt Express, I guess, but he doesn't seem to be 'lining with anyone, and seemed to be attempting to sell the airline a couple of weeks ago. I guess the worst you can do is say no, anyway:

Cheatsheet:

Liberty Airlines Mainline: Currently 5th largest in the world by passenger numbers, though I'm not sure how much longer that's going to last.

- 168 aircraft + 3 orders
* 53 B737NG
* 41 CRJ-200/700/900
* 49 DHC-8
* 18 E-190/195
* 1 B767
* 9 Tu-204

Liberty Airlink:

- 22 aircraft
* 7 ATR-42/72
* 15 Cessna Caravan

North Country Airlines

- 9 aircraft
* 6 ERJ-145
* 3 DHC-8

So a total of 199 aircraft at the moment; the Tu-204s are leaving the fleet at the moment, having been brought in for a short-term capacity boost, and will probably all have left the fleet in ~14 days.

Operations:

- Right now, two major and one minor mainline hubs:
* Washington Dulles - total 2188 departures per week, 202778 seats out per week
* St. Louis - total 2361 departures per week , 221906 seats out per week
* Raleigh/Durham - total 781 departures per week, ~60000 seats out per week

Liberty Airlink operates prop feeder services out of Dulles and St. Louis, along with a limited regional point-to-point service in New England using Cessna Caravans.

North Country Airlines operates jet feeder services out of St. Louis, and maintains a mini-hub at Chicago Midway.

Routemap:

As you can see, Dulles and Raleigh are primarily focused on North-South traffic; the longest flight currently operated from Washington is to Denver, which is not really all that far. Raleigh is essentially a reliever operation for Dulles, due to the lack of slots resulting from having two major airlines based at one airport, and in the long term is intended to take over as the primary east-coast hub, assuming noone else huge builds up there.

St. Louis handles the entirety of my transcontinental traffic right now, along with the Midwest regional operation, and still has a reasonable amount of room for growth.

My gameplan to start off was, essentially, to fly to places noone else was bothering with; the rest of the world has caught up, of course, but the airline's focus is still much more heavily weighted towards small-airport operations than most others seem to be.

50 seats is the cutoff point I've been using for business class / none; the ATR-72s, CRJ-700s and DHC8-400s have a business cabin, but the AT42, CR2, ERJ-145 and DH8-200s do not.

Financials:

- Last week's profit ended up as $72.49m on an income of $132.16m, so a 55% profit margin. I don't jack prices up to the roof, particularly on regional flights, so long-term I'm anticipating the profit margin will stabilize around 35-40%.

I, uh, guess that's it. Feel free to ask me anything - I've been posting weekly airline updated on the AS forum that you might have noticed, so there's enough public history to go around, heh.

Tom wrote:

-What for tasks within the alliance would you like to take over? Where are your strengths? (For example network co-ordination, support to other users, helping to create the alliance presentation).

I can pretty much do anything you want me to, what with the whole 'not being an addled 14-year old' thing; I've taken to doing most graphics work in CorelDraw these days as it's what I use for geological mapping anyway and the return on a similar amount of effort is much nicer with vectors. I can also fix your Engrish

Quote :

- What do you expect from the Infinity Alliance?

- Why do you want to become a infinity member?

Fundamentally I'm not - personally - particularly thrilled that the 'old guard' alliances have moved across from the German servers, understandable as it may be, so I thought it'd be interesting to try and boost up a new competitor to them; as I mentioned, we were kicking about with starting a new one, assuming that noone else had, and when I was looking at the wiki alliances page I noticed you guys - you don't seem to have done more than edit that a couple of times as far as publicity goes, which is rather a shame since I'd have been here weeks ago if you had. Besides that, I've mostly been operating off IL contracts with half a dozen two-bit EU airlines with regards to TATL connections, and I was kinda hoping I could find someone a bit more, uh, credible? I don't particularly intend to put together a large international network - but you guys probably do, which makes an airline heavily focused on US domestic routes useful.

e: oh, yeah - I'd hope you guys would look into adding 1-2 more US members on pretty short order, though; it's a big country, and I can't do everything!

Quote :

- what disturbs me is that in your fleet you are operating nine Tupolevs. Would you be ready to replace them through modern, western aircrafts?

I don't really find it believable that you find it 'disturbing'; as I mentioned in the post right above, they were brought in as a short-term capacity boost and are being phased out. Dulles has the unfortunate distinction of hosting the homebase operations of the 5th and 7th largest airlines in the world right now, so it got very busy very quickly; I don't consider using the aircraft in itself a problem, given the current situation with leasing old aircraft - particularly not the 204-120s, given that they're the "westernized" version of the thing. I'd be far more worried about all the An-140s, personally!

Quote :

- Do you have any question about infinity?

How high is your tolerance for bullshit? Mine's preeeeeettttty low. Conversely, my tolerance for rudeness is unlimited, so you're invited to tell me how you really feel about anything at any time.

Just take it easy dude

As much as I've realised, Tom only has copied his questions from another thread, possibly due to lack of time to properly read your otherwise sound and detailed introduction

As we are (luckily ) a bit overwhelmed with applications (we're really glad, believe me:)) please give us a few days to work out our issues, and as soon as possible, we will contact you here.

Admin wrote:

Just take it easy dude

Well, I guess there's a first time for everything...

Please, give us some more time to discuss your application. We are working on the question as hard as possible .

Admin wrote:

Please, give us some more time to discuss your application. We are working on the question as hard as possible .

Well, you're clearly doing something - I noticed the post number go up from about 80 to 125 over the past couple of days, heh.