Another is high labor productivity, yet another is high asset utilization. The net result is that AirTran has one of the lowest levels of cost per ASM in the industry. In terms of weaknesses, one major weakness is that AirTran has no discernable source of sustainable competitive advantage. Its success to date has been based on its ability to combine many small sources of advantage into a single airline. Yet,

Southwest Airlines Strengths: Southwest has the lowest prices per seat of any other airline. Moreover their pricing structure is simple and relatively transparent to passengers, with few classes of fares and few ticket reservations. They are able to do this due to providing frequent point-to-point service between secondary airports that are on average only 515 miles apart. They offer more direct, non-stop flights than the traditional hub and spoke system, and have

Classic Airlines has the reputation of being the world's fifth largest airline, which commands a fleet of more than 375 jets that serve 240 cities with over 2,300 daily flights. Classic, around for more than 25 years, employs more than 23,000 employees and the year before this report earned $10 million on $8.7 billion in sales. Classic also has a glorious reputation for its integrity with Labor Unions due to the

2). Air Cargo, Inc. only flew cargo from December, 1941 (when Pearl Harbor was attacked) through November, 1944. At that time, Siddiqi explains that individual airline companies authored their own freight services, and on page 2 the author of this article notes that in time the major passenger airlines began offering freight forwarding service and that pretty well eliminated the need for a whole fleet of airline companies that just

Dierct Air - Management & Marketing Mistakes The following case study employs the array of industry metrics discussed above to determine major factors that contributed to Direct Airways filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy during the time period from 2007-212. This time period was chosen because SEC filings at that time available, providing valuable insight into the stark differences between the two airlines. Direct Airways was a major U.S. carrier that was

S. Air hub in Phoenix is nearby the Delta hub in Salt Lake City. Typically, airlines seeking out acquisition targets seek to fill voids in hub locations rather than select airlines with lots of hubs close to their own. For example, critics of the U.S. Air offer state that United would have been a far better suitor for Delta because of the synergies between United's tran-Pacific routes and international networking