SWAPA wasn't afraid of arbitration, management was. SWAPA prepared diligently for the arbitration process, at great cost, and was ready to make what we all felt were compelling arguments in that process. Management on the other hand wanted a quickly resolved list. Since they have no codeshare options to begin realizing synergies absent a quick agreement, they made two proposals to speed this deal along. The second proposal was ratified by both memberships. SWAPA's highly paid consulting firms informed the membership that the deal on the table was more beneficial to the group than an arbitrated settlement, and advised us to vote yes.

Hopefully there will be no additional mergers on the horizon for SWA. SWAPA wanted no part of this one. Scope will not be relaxed in the future to enable management an ability to easily grow the airline externally. Surely you can see that controlling external growth is a huge benifit to the pilot group considering what is occurring at your own airline presently. The membership is already clamoring to increase the mergers and acquisition protections in our upcoming section 6 negotiations.

To answer the question as to what did we get other than seniority, we got the addition of the beneficial assets that AT brought to the table that management was after in the first place. On the seniority front we got an initial bump that will slowly be eroded away to the equivalent of an additional .02% gain at the time of my retirement for me personally over where I would have been with a stand alone SWA. In order to get more than that in the form of contractual improvements or compensation improvements we would have had to offer scope concessions to achieve those benefits. That option was never on the table, nor should it have been.