Mary Schlangenstein at Bloomberg has a pretty good wrap piece on the American Eagle news from today.

As I have shared with a number of you privately this afternoon, I tend to agree with Bob Mann’s comments in this piece. While this may make the “activist” shareholders happy — I’m not so sure that American Eagle is that great a prize, nor will it garner much of a high price.

In the piece, Bob says, “I’m betting this one flops, compared to expectations. Investors may not want a stable of 37-, 44-, 50-seat jets and older Saab aircraft.”

He added, “Investors will want to diversify away from American Airlines-only flying, while AMR will want an exclusive, or protection from competitors.”

Yep.

The regional sector is growth-constrained, Eagle’s aircraft are older, smaller, and more expensive to fly, there is the pilot issue (the contract here is going to be tied to the mainline negotiations to an extent it appears now) and let’s face it — the gung-ho environment that Continental spun ExpressJet into simply does not exist today. Nor is it going to exist in 2008.

So while Craig Hall, who is the airline’s fifth largest shareholder tells Mary, “This is a good first step. We certainly hope that they are still looking at spinning off the mileage program, as we believe the biggest opportunity is there,” and we can be sure that the FL Group, the largest AMR shareholder is happy with the news, remember that all they are looking for is a bump in the stock price. Meanwhile, AMR is looking for more cost stability.

But neither of those two necessarily go hand in hand with an overly generous price being paid for Eagle. Not in this environment. And not with the equipment Eagle is flying.

Ticker: (NYSE:AMR)

Technorati Tags: American Airlines, American Eagle

Good news for the things with wings today. Weekly inventory numbers issued by the Energy Department this morning showed the drop in crude inventories was lower than expected,  gasoline inventories increased more than expected, and the drop in distillates, which includes the all-important jet fuel, was minimal.

Refinery output was also up for the week.

Wrap all this up together with increasing economic indicators that continue to point to a slowing economy (which theoretically should bring a decline in demand) and voila! Oil prices were down 4% or $3.80 to $90.62 today.

The price of crude has now fallen 7.2% in the last two days.

This fact was not overlooked by airline sector investors today. While the Dow Jones Blue Chip average was up 331.01 points on the day, or 2.55%. the AMEX Airline Index was up a healthy 4% to 40.02.

Leading gainers today included Allegiant, which posted a sizzling 7% gain, closing today at 34.51. It was a day of the 7% gain, apparently as US Airways was also up 7% on the day, closing at 20.97. AMR, parent of American was also up 7%, closing at 21.98. And, yes, Delta Air Lines was also up 7% on the day, closing at 18.77.

Our two always-volatile Chinese airline stocks had another bounce-off-the-wall day as well, as ADRs of China Eastern Airlines were up 21%, closing at 100.89, while ADRs of China Southern were up 8%, closing at 65.20.

Shares of Pinnacle didn’t have a bad day, with shares here closing up 7% to 15.72, while shares of Republic were up 8%, closing at 20.27. Skywest? Up 5% to close at 25.65.

Even shares of Mesa, which have posted a horrible month, had a good day. Shares were up 9%, closing at 3.45.

Technorati Tags: airline industry news, airlines, crude oil, wall street