Originally Posted by Kingbird87

My NWA pilot view is that this merger is off to a miserable start. The pre-merger negotiations on each groups behalf were a disaster and we both screwed the pooch at a golden opportunity. Now RA has used the divide and conquer method with DALPA to poison the well, and I believe that the minute gains made for the Delta pilots were an effort to stroke your group to accept this and the further acrimony of SLI. I have watched the NWA pilots fight the red book/green book war for 21 years. And the gist of my take on that has been that red book pilots didn't care as much as to how well they did as a whole, as much as that they did better than the green book pilots.
After years of speculation, bankruptcies, and finally with the chance to make a go of building a world mega carrier, the engineers of this merger were met with a collective yawn from Wall Street. And if RA succeeds in further dividing the two pilot groups, this will pan out as a disaster to all of our careers.
I know we are all preoccupied with our own navels and suppose for an instant, we got this thing together and used our collective strengths to further all of our potential. What might that mean?
The synergy of the Delta route structure to feed the unprecedented fifth freedom rights to Tokyo and beyond will create unbelievable opportunities for us all. In five years, 747's, 777's, 787's, 767's and A330's will be swarming Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, India, Amsterdam, Paris, and Frankfurt. Dormant route authority will fuel further growth as the feed from Delta's east coast dominance will make business traffic to Asia, Europe and South America surge. The KLM/Air France alignment will align competition to be complimentary and not predatory. NWA's old domestic route structure is the last great SWA/LCC free segment of this country, and the unfortunate souls that fill NWA's airplanes from the Fargo's, Bismarcks, and Edmontons will be filling larger airplanes to go where they have to. This is about open skies, and aligning this company to regain the business markets, and the ATL/MSP/LGA/DTW flights to take rug rats to Disney World, and auto workers to drunken orgies in Cancun will fade into chump work.
We pilots need to envision that, and force our MEC's to respond to our collective futures. Lee Moak needs to step up to the plate, squash the suicidal picketing threats and meager one sided bargaining for scraps. Dave Stevens needs to act like a leader, get a real attitude that the train has already left the station, stop howling about preventing this merger, and they both need to hammer out a seniority list without the inevitable destruction of a prolonged arbitration. This is our opportunity to shape our own futures, instead of responding to the tired old mantra of I've got more than those other guys. Just my take on this thing.