Quote:
Originally Posted by gloopy
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.

This is the best summary of our industry I've seen in awhile. When people ask me what I think of VX, JB, Spirit, ect., I never quite know how to answer, but from now on I'm just going to paste this on my phone, and show it to them. I don't hold any grudges against my fellow pilots for taking these jobs, but I do resent the system that creates them, and keeps our compensation and work rules so poor. I have a friend who is younger and works for JB. He makes more than I do (I work for a legacy carrier- it doesn't matter which). It's hard for him to understand that one of the reasons my pay is so low, is because of the success of his company- which got successful for the reasons stated above by gloopy. I don't hold it against him, and I don't want to see his pay go down, but some day (possibly soon), he will be in my shoes watching some other ULCC start-up undercutting his company and putting downward pressure on his pay. Hopefully he'll be able to understand better then and maybe work towards a real solution. Going by history (and all the ridiculous arguments on this forum), I don't think the chances are too good.