Facts:

- The 11-09 realignment is an expensive one-time cost.
- Delta is supposed to reimburse Pinnacle for increased training costs.
- Q400 and Delta 900 contracts are causing us to lose money.
- Both the Q400 and the CRJ900 or profitable aircraft.
- UAL has agreed to a modification to the Q400 contract to keep Pinnacle afloat.
- Pinnacle got a grace period on the Q400 payments.
- Labor costs have gone up due to the pilot contract.
- Sean Menke asked pilots to take an indefinite 5% pay cut, then he changed it to a 7% pay cut for 1 year with a snap back to normal pay, and finally the last union email update stated they were talking about the 5% cut again.
- We are still hiring at a good rate.

Rumors:

- If negotiations do not work out, all Q400s and SAABs will be gone in a year and they will furlough out of seniority order and shut down the Colgan operation.
- All SAABs will be gone in 1 year.
- There are apparently 1 or 2 new Q400s painted in UAL colors in Toronto (I have not personally seen them and won’t believe it until I see pictures).
- Delta wants to take the 16 900s and give them to ASA/ExpressJet.

Speculation:

Sean Menke is just testing the waters on possible pay concessions to see if we bite.

Despite the threat of bankruptcy and the possible major loss of airframes we are still hiring because we may be getting more Q400s. The order for more Q400s may have been a supporting reason behind the postponement of the Q400 payments.

UAL may have been in talks with SkyWest or someone else about Q400 flying and is going to send some aircraft to another regional in order to play us against each other. This would be a costly and timely expense for UAL, but if it causes us to compete with another regional, UAL may see this as a worthwhile investment to drive down costs.

Delta management gets bored and decides to move aircraft around just for fun.

Conclusion:

No matter what happens, the one thing that does not make sense is the requested concessions in pay. 5% of our pay is barley going to affect our bottom line. The 7% for 1 year only reeks of management trickery.

Our fate was decided years ago and giving management a self-inflicted pay cut is just icing on the cake for management. Until we get more information all of this is just speculation that we should not let take over our lives.