United Has a Shot at The Regional Flexibility It Craves
At the International Aviation Forecast Summit last week, United President Scott Kirby was unsurprisingly in high demand. After his presentation, he took a few minutes to sit with a handful of media so we could fire questions at him. I asked Scott about “scope relief,” something I wrote about back in March. As always, he wasn’t shy in his response. In fact, Scott said that United is already in negotiations with the pilots on this issue. While I would have thought this was impossible before, I now think there could be an opportunity here.
I realize this needs a little background before we get into Scott’s comments. Airlines have “scope clauses” in their contracts with pilots. These scope clauses limit the number, type, weight, and seat count of aircraft that can be flown by regional providers under the mainline brand. These were demanded by pilots to protect mainline pilot jobs from being outsourced to lower cost providers.
United will tell you it has the most restrictive scope clause of the big three US airlines, but that’s not entirely true. Here’s a comparison:
| No meaningful limit |
