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

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