Originally Posted by
Bucking Bar
Ask those who told you that to show you an Agenda, or meeting notes. I believe you will find they do not exist.
Contract this to the NWA merger. How did those first meetings go? Was an agreement reached on seniority? Were those meetings reported? Was a merger eventually completed, despite our differences on seniority?
Having experienced the NWA merger, I will leave it to you to decide whether that merger could have been derailed on the basis of a failure to reach an instant agreement on seniority. I submit (with no proof other than the results) that the Delta MEC looked at NWA and saw an airline they wanted to merge with. It was inconceivable that an airline with similar (and bigger) equipment would not be merged with.
In contrast, ASA and Comair had nothing the Delta MEC wanted. Small jets that paid less and would be flown below their seniority ... why fight for that?
You guys just keep forgetting that DALPA does not make business decisions for management. we don't decide mergers. In the case of the NWA merger RA gave DALPA veto authority if we could not reach a prenuptial agreement on seniority. It was a throwaway item. He never intended to honor that promise. When we told him we could not reach a agreement he waited a few weeks and did the merger anyway.
When Delta not DALPA purchased ASA and Comair there was no intent ever on the part of Delta to merge the airlines. You can rest assured the Comair group looked at every available legal option for force a merger and could not find a attorney to even give them a remote hope of succeeding. That is why they went the route they did.
The giant mistake made by Comair was that they were so intent on trying to force there way onto the Delta seniority list that they skipped the logical first step. They should have filed for a single carrier determination with the NMB between themselves and ASA. There was legal precedent that virtually assured them of winning that issue that came from the AE filing. The failure to do so by the Comair group was huge in where they have ended up today.