I see we have had one more trip down the conspiracy theory route in regards to a major airline holding company buying a regional carrier and the merger supposedly stopped by either:

1. The evil ALPA National
2. The prejudiced mainline pilot group

This has been covered here many times, yet the same people seem to come up with the same wrong answers no matter how many times they have been corrected. So let's get it straight again.

1. Companies merge with other companies
2. Pilots integrate their lists AFTER the companies decide to merge

There is no such thing as a pilot initiated merger. In the case of Delta, after Delta bought ASA and Comair, Delta management decided that they wanted to operate them as separate carriers. They didn't even want to merge ASA and Comair. Since the companies weren't merging, it was sheer lunacy for pilots to start talking about merging their seniority lists.

This lunacy was portrayed as some black helicopter conspiracy to keep the regional pilots down or (insert your own conspiracy theory here). The fact is, if Delta was not going to merge with Comair, then what good does it do to try to merge the seniority lists? You could merge the seniority lists by date of hire, staple, shoe size, height, or any other factor you want to use, but in the end if the company doesn't merge then the Comair pilots are not employees of Delta, they don't have a Delta ID card, they haven't gone through Delta training. Delta management retains all the rights to determine those.

When Delta bought Northwest through the stock swap, there is only one reason why Delta had to merge the two seniority lists. It was required in both the DAL and NWA pilot contracts. Without that clause, Delta could have operated the two as separate carriers forever. Look at Skywest and ASA to see how that is done.

So could we please stop the lunatic conspiracy theories about PID's being squashed. Say it again over and over until it sinks in:

Management merges companies, pilots do not.