gloopy

I see where you are going with that, and agree that the issue should of, and could have, been fixed during the golden opportunity of C2K while ASA and CMR were also in section 6, CMR having the leverage of a strike and DL having the leverage of a management team ready to sign something to close the book, and ASA at least with an open book.

But neither ASA or CMR were willing to accept a staple. The 70's weren't even flying yet and the 90 (76 seater) was a paper airplane and the large EMB jets weren't around yet either. Not to mention NW had a lot more DC-9's, including the much smaller variants than the −50.

There is blame to go around on both sides here. But the bottom line is, all the bullet points you pointed out above about how they sold their own code, had their own marketing departments, etc, was all ammo the PID/RJDC folks used to try and get DL, by choice or force, to commit to binding arbitration after which anything could happen. DL had no choice but to put up walls.

The definiton of "operational integration" was changed to something so rediculous as to border on intellectual sophistry if not outright satire, but the alternative would have been to go to arbitration and hope for a staple. The other side of that risk was flat out catastrophic for the DL pilot group and flat out claim jumper for the ASA/CMR pilot groups with no downside risk whatsoever. The worse they could have done was a staple and while everyone was hiring and they would havegained the mobility of mainline positions (at the bottom only) even that would have been a windfall especially if all the "deal me an ace" bottom feeder future growth was diverted to them as well. Even the 9-11 crisis would have been absorbed at DCI with very little adverse effects as the (percieved) need for RJ's went way up and pilot jobs were added there in far greater numbers than mainline jobs that were moved to the street.

But the massive upside and limited downside wasn't good enough, they (the failed leaderships at both connection MEC's in question as well as their respective "silent MEC's" that became the PID then RJDC at both, wanted to take a stab at seeing how much greater than a staple they could get. They (again, the MEC's/RJDCers) spent years saying "see we told you so" as DL pilots hit the streets confident in their strategy and still thinking they would get greater than the bottom DL number in seniority one day (and of course get to slide over to DL at 12 year pay with full longevity, naturally).

But before 9-11 they thought they had the chance for a, yes, land grab, and they took it. Even to this day, some still think they have leverage especially if they would be approached by ALPA/DALPA. Maybe not so much at CMR anymore (although there are likely still holdouts) but at ASA more likely, and we've all heard their arguements.

Again, neither side handled things perfectly and all sides are worse off because of it. The issue remains dammaging and open and needs to be fixed. But the fact remains that there is no way we will allow even one number of seniority jumping with any kind of DCI tie up. Merger, lease juggling, flow through, whatever, the top DCI pilot will always be junior to the bottom DL pilot for 77 seats and up (soon to be less than that hopefully when we rightfully recapture scope) or its no deal. We can fix this in other ways if we have to.

No land grab, no arbitration. Period.