SkyWest announced today that it has named Brad Holt the new President and COO of Atlantic Southeast.

Holt replaces not only former ASA President Bryan LeBreque, who announced his resignation earlier this month, but previous COO Anthony DiNota, who left the airline in October.

To put it another way — the Delta-placed execs at ASA who came over as part of the deal originally are now gone, and SkyWest has now put one of its own at the top of the heap.

Holt has been with SkyWest for 25 years, having worked in Flight Ops, Operations, and the airline’s Corporate Safety division. Holt’s last position with SkyWest was as head of Flight Operations. Holt began with the airline as a line pilot in 1983.

Good move. Long needed move. With the pilots giving the thumbs-up to the ASA tentative agreement this week, and with these changes in management structure — I can only say — it’s about time. I would expect that we will begin to see the positive ramifications reflected in SkyWest’s next earnings call — but even more so in the first quarter 2008 call.

As we had mentioned here after this quarter’s SkyWest earnings call — it was the first time that I can ever remember SkyWest not receiving at least one of its incentive payments for service — as part of its flying contract with a partner. And that happened last quarter with ASA. While SkyWest, as usual, ran a pretty efficient operation, ASA was horrible.

The airline failed to meet even one of its contract incentive benchmarks.

A side note to the pilots at ASA: Remember when I told you in February of 2006 at the ALPA “Family Awareness” meeting in Atlanta that the SkyWest deal was a good thing — and not a bad thing?

It may have taken awhile — but I stand by my prediction.

Ticker: (Nasdaq:SKYW), (NYSE:DAL)

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