This industry is so dynamic. It's tough to stay ahead of the curve with all of the changes. I'm sure it's a lot tougher for a pilot, with seniority being the huge factor it is. I hope your Comair friend is at least enjoying himself.

I think the lack of deicing fluid/crew scheduling meltdown were part of the same incident. Of course any airline must plan for contingencies, but many airlines/hubs have run short of deicing fluid before (I've personally had my airplane (nice widebody with a few hundred pax) stuck a couple times due to shortages of deicing fluid.........one of those times we had contracted to use DL's stock.......but they ran out). While Comair shouldn't have run out of deicing fluid, it was caused by a weather phenomenon of record snowfall for the region. That lead to a massive amount of crew scheduling changes, which basically broke the software. The whole situation was such that one thing lead to another, the root cause being poor weather and poor planning……….though still far from acceptable. They basically had to do exactly what Jetblue just did this week.

I think the biggest thing Comair did to bite the hand that fed them was the pilots’ strike…….Don’t think it went the way they thought it would.

Whether calculated by DL or not, the biggest thing that did Comair in was being the only wholly owned, and the only regional with a flexible contract allowing a reduction in flying. DL needed to cut CRJs, and Comair was the only place to cut them without penalty. This lead to the airline being much larger than it’s fleet, and the labor costs being way too excessive to ever compete…………which allowed a really big reduction in CRJ flying when they all went to the desert (TUS I think).
I find it kind of funny that many of my current colleagues started with airlines such as: Eastern, North Central, PSA, TWA, PanAm, and little ones that have long faded into history, like Mohawk, Cascade, Bonanza, etc. Hopefully I’ll be around in 40 years telling my younger colleagues about starting with little old Comair.