I would like to see people stop drawing the WRONG conclusions from C2000.

The UAL pilots could have had the non-instustry leading CAL contract of that era and UAL still would have filed BK. The >30% drop in revenue that UAL experienced in 2001/2002 was greater than the combined payroll for all 100K UAL employees. The pilots could have worked for free and UAL would still have faced a dire cash-flow crisis given the timing of UA's debt schedule.

And the extreme revenue shockwave impacted every single major US airline except for SWA which luckily had no exposure where the impart was deepest: international markets. Even the two major airlines that barely averted bankruptcy (AA & CAL) ended up with deeply concessionary pilot contracts as part of their enormous corporate restructurings outside of bankruptcy.

The lesson from history: there was no escape---even for the airlines that started with "fair" (i.e. bottom tier) pilot contracts. (Of course, non-major JetBlue flourished during that period while paying A320 Captains $80/hr.)