Originally Posted by
Bocaflyer
Some updates for you. Upgrades take 3-4 years at present; if you want to sit reserve or not. Most pilots here came from 20-30 years of failed carriers just like myself. Plenty of time and experience in the wrong jobs. We didn't come here to drink kool aid, we came here to get off of unemployment and feed our families. And like the legacies and else where, we have a large share of Regional captains that came here, because god forbid they were tired of Mesa and the likes.
Save the insults in our general direction, just because I don't believe your boogie man stories. I know for a FACT that 99% of your post is incorrect. I have better sources than a friend of a friend of a VP said. Lol. Have a good day man, it's Sunday go spend time with the family! Every now and then my wife bans me (mercifully) from APC and FI, and I spend about 3 happy years in exile. I'm starting to remember why.
Not friend of a friend, but directly from the (higher than a) VP in question. You can't possibly pretend you blew through half a billion dollars in a few years with just a few airplanes and have perpetually been down to your last 20 million or so every quarter while losing more than that almost every quarter anything other than "royal" intervention.
If you are as experienced (and old) as you say, then you are a relatively short timer and I do understand you running the numbers on things and realizing that VX is likely the final stop for you. For others they are playing the "I'll be in the top 500 of a mega major one day" but whatever. Its all part of the very same labor busting longevity shredding churn the industry is made of. The cycle will always continue. Start up a new airline, pay everyone first year everything on a drastically reduced pay and benefits package, get new airplanes leapfrogging in technology and ammenities, wash, rinse, file bankruptcy because now your costs are higher and here comes another start up and repeat. I get it, I just don't like it.
Don't h8 the playa though, its the game. Rich people will never, ever, get tired of playing with airplanes, and pilots will never not take the best deal they can get at any given time. Some cling to a fantasy that mass refusal to work by all pilots will make the labor corporate churn go away but that's the ultimate pipe dream. That will never happen nor should it even be a goal. Pure fantasy. But the many, many hundreds of aircraft on the order books for so called LCC's and present and future start ups while other airlines stagnate, shrink and fade away make this very much a zero sum game. If VX succeeds to the extent it strives to, the same amount of jobs will be lost at other carriers to provide lower paying and much more junior jobs there. That's just how it works.
I guess in that regard we're like these guys:
We're both trying to run the other out of a job, and to deny that is either a flat out lie or a hyper-idealized delusion. There is not room for all the present ULCC's, much less future ones, and the existing legacy airlines. Something has to give. "Just feeding my family" will be the ink the winners write the outcome of history in.