David Barger - Chief Executive Officer and Director
Management
Sure, and thanks for the question, Gary. And you are right, a return to sustained double-digit margins for all of us in the industry become more difficult with fuel starting to touch $90 per barrel; no question about that. And plus just the competitive landscape, we have obviously new entrants in our landscape. Gary, the route review is dynamic, it's ongoing and, as alluded to previously, there are still markets that we are closely watching, new markets that we opened in 2006 regarding maturity. And so no announcement today outside of Columbus and Nashville, but that's one piece that's in play. I think as we talk about longer term strategy and how do we redeploy those airplanes, as we look to redeploy those airplanes and keep in mind that we have calmed down the growth, and John alluded to that again today with just the calming of the growth across the airline. We are starting much more a focused initiative on overflies. And whether they are seasonal or whether they remain year around such as Syracuse down to Orlando as a specific where we have been in there for a period of time, that is also part of the longer term strategy of the airline. And it's in alignment with the E190 acquisition when we discussed E190 as a board almost four and a half years ago. The number of overflies that we have in play, we have announced just between November and January 11 new routes, and 2 of them down to the Caribbean, 1 of them out West and 8 of them, from an overfly perspective, along up and down the East Coast. Only two of those routes touch JFK down to the Dominical Republic and St. Maarten. Now that doesn't mean that we are not going to grow JFK, Gary, but it's... when we look at longer term growth, congestion, what's in play with the government intervention, we will see that what means. But we have clearly had a change where actually we flew over the summer timeframe fewer flights than we did during the peak of, say, the President's weekend and Easter timeframe, Passover earlier this year. We are looking internationally as I responded to with Mike's comment, and clearly, we'll start to move the 190s into the Midwest and out west as well as we find opportunities to do so. So quite a bit of change it's really playing. And one last comment Gary, international partnerships at Kennedy. And right now, we have got... we've talked about Aer Lingus. We are optimistic about sales that will take place with Aer Lingus here and monetizing JFK, and finally making that a reality as well. So quite a bit of initiative in play, Gary, to really change the direction of the airline.