Buzz,

My father spent 9 out his first 16 years in our profession on furlough. He had two airlines go bust out from under him, or rather I should say, flew for two airlines that had their assets transferred. He worked as a mechanic when he could not find work flying. Sometimes he worked three jobs, not only to support us, but also as the sole provider for his mother and help with a couple of nearly destitute relatives. Can not recall that he ever complained, but he was tired and never really happy unless he was flying.


The second asset transfer happened when I was 16. I took my first full time job two weeks after my 16th birthday and have worked at least one job every day of my life since then. My schedule for the six years it took me to get my undergrad done was 07:40 am at work ... a few of my classes let out at 00:20. My parents never asked for money, but I did save up some cash so we could take a family vacation. Dad found work flying in Saudi. I do not recall seeing him much until I was 24. I will leave the details of our family life out of this, but yeah, I get it. He is a great guy. He really appreciated his later career with FedEx.


This thorough understanding of what furlough and career instability is the exact reason why I've worked to try to improve our profession's perspective on unity.

Rather than focus on the emotive question of how anyone feels about furlough it would better if folks like CGHerk would refocus on the structures their association has created which caused our pilots to be furloughed. It frustrates me that his posts criticize pilots for their feelings when these emotions impede the objective changes that we need to get done to unify our profession, thus avoiding asset transfers, furloughs and job losses out of seniority.

In other words; you probably took a furlough that should have been mine. Why did you (and the Delta pilots) allow that to happen? Was disunity with ASA and Comair worth it? (not picking on you, it is a rhetorical question and I think we agree on the answer)

I've heard a couple of pilots who are in the know state considerations for what would amount to a one way flow up to Delta. Management wants to avoid flow down because it makes it more cumbersome to administer furloughs and a lot of men with ALPA lapel pins seem to have no problem with that idea.

How can it be that we are so against Norweigen, Emirates, Etihad et. al. taking "our" flying when we still happily outsource 40% of our domestic flying to alter ego versions of our own airlines? We have no moral authority to ask for restrictions when we build half of our Section 1 on permitted arrangements to outsource flying within our own brand.

We can change these structures. I do not ever want a pilot on this list to be furloughed.