The latest grasping at straws strategy: hire someone else to do your flying for you.
In a business where a 10% operating margin is unusual, and the whole point is to recapture margin wherever possible, it makes zero sense to pay someone else to do your flying and pay them 10- 12% to do so. WJ explored this concept in the Spring of 1995 and dismissed the idea after a couple hours discussion with an established ACMI operator. It made no sense at all. Greyhound also found this out the hard way.
CanJet has already been burned badly playing in the sched business a couple of times, and, compared to the Jetlines brain trust, are experienced veterans. Jetlines brings nothing to the table that CanJet hasn't already explored and likely rejected. I would think Ken Rowe and Co would want nothing to do with anything that resulted in their taking any risk after having personally seen the volume of red ink that can be generated by the implementation of an ill-thought out plan for a sched operation.
Just operating one aircraft a day would require at least $80,000 a day in payments to CanJet. Sounds easy in theory, but CanJet knows in practice how difficult it is to accomplish, day in , day out 365 days a year. If CanJet had any brains, they'd want irrevocable letters of credit for at least 30 days of operations. With a three aircraft operation, we're talking $240,000 x 30 days = $7.2m. That simply covers flight ops. Then there are all the other expenses.
As for a foreign investor, lest anyone has forgotten, there's the 25% limit of foreign investors. Given the business acumen displayed thus far by Jetlines, can you imagine any foreign investor pumping cash into the enterprise, whilst leaving control of the operation in the hands of Jetlines management? Never say never, but you'd have to be some kind of stupid to willingly do that sort of deal.
Once again, I find it tremendously telling that Jetlines feels the need to continuously leak it's plans to the media at every opportunity. If I were at CanJet, I'd listen politely and then lose Jetlines phone number.