The month I got hired

While in indoc, Harry Nolan gave a talk at my undergraduate school, so the wife and I got a char next to the President of UPS and ate dinner with him. He outlined the upcoming Northwest merger and told me unequivocally to quit. His point was NWA had a dying network and the merger would be hell on the Delta employees as everyone came in on top of us new hires. The "Delta culture" would be replaced by Northwest's. He expected furloughs and told me I would be on the street. (impolite dinner conversation to say the least)

Things have gone a lot better than Harry estimated. He was right about the merger (back in mid 2007 when White, then Anderson & ALPA were denying it). He was right about the network dynamics. He was wrong about furloughs and the Corporate crash and burn he expected to result. I think he also was mistaken about the cultural issues. There are great (and not so great) folks from both backgrounds.

I'm on the fence about recommending Delta. It was expected 2012 would be flat and towards the end of the year we would see our first positive bid since December 2008 and the beginning of a hiring wave. That is not happening and despite early retirements there is officially no end in sight for our capacity reductions and down bids. It looks as though some people might make an entire career on the Douglas equipment.

I don't see how things could be that bad. Data points that should indicate improvement:

• Widebodies coming out of mod lines
• AF/KLM remain roughly 7 to 8% above the terms of our JV language, I expect that to get caught back up as we have metal available and AF/KLM rationalizes their money losing network
• Delta officially kicked the 100 seat jet order to this Spring. I've not read news of the cancellation (just crew room briefing reports that muddy the issue)
• An economy which is better than forecast
• Very strong revenue generation
• Management is achieving its goals (slot swap, terminal construction, etc ... which they have stated would add pilot jobs)

That is a lot to be wrong about, if what we can get with our seniority is really circling the proverbial bowl... .

I did screw up by not going to FedEx the second they started pulling from the pool. But, there were issues there too. They had a lot of >60 Flight Engineers bidding back to the left seat and the junior bases were unappealing. In retrospect the Compass divestiture was probably the signal to move on. It demonstrated our union's position towards scope & performing our own flying. Change of this policy is essential to making Delta a good place to work.