Originally Posted by
Denny Crane
I would agree with those guys. I too think this is the very beginning of a long hiring cycle. I think this one will be bigger than the 1985 to 1991 cycle. If you look at that one, just ask Timbo about the merits of being hired at the front of the wave!
That hiring cycle looked very much like a bell curve, slowly gathering steam and then tapering off. I'm guessing the same thing is going to happen here also only you guys ARE at the head of the class. At least that's what my crystal ball says!
Denny
Hey...I resemble that remark!
I've always said I'd rather be lucky than good! I have found though, the harder I work, the luckier I get.
1985 was a great time to be hired at Delta, no doubt, my first seniority number was 3879, but at that time in newhire class, the hot rumor was, they were only going to hire 200 of us, just to get them through the merger, with....
North West!
Then we were going to be furloughed.
The first furloughs didn't happen until 1993, after the Pan Am merger, (thanks to Mo'Ron) and we did finally merge with NW obviously, after Western and Pan Am, my number was above 5000 after those two mergers.
I don't know if the next 6 years will resemble the hiring spree of 1985-91, but we can hope!
There are several things in our contract today, that didn't exist back then, that will mitigate their need to hire as many, and it certainly won't be a one for one replacement of the 3000+ pilots hired between 1985-1991, some of whom will be turning 65 in the next 5 years. You are stuck with me for another 10+, sorry.
In 1985 we had a hard 75hr. cap, bow wave/spill back, trips dropped touching vacations, etc. The guys I flew engineer for used to brag about how much time off they had, not about how many hours they flew.
Now we have PBS, no cap on swaps, pilot to pilot pick ups, vacation bank, reserves can fly ALV+15, etc. All of those things are allowing guys to fly well over 100 mo. where in 1985, there was no monetary incentive to fly over 75, it would just go into your bow wave for next month.
Those items were all put in the contract for one reason, lower the required body count going forward. I'm guessing those items will save the company at least 20% body count, compared to what we needed under our 1985 contract, to fly the same block hours.