Originally Posted by sailingfun

The contract was inked in July. The industry had been in free fall since April. The 01 contract I don't recall having much influence on staffing. If you were talking about the 96 contract or LOA 46 or the 1113 contract I would agree with you. In fact I pointed out on this forum many times that work rule changes were a bigger factor then RJ's. In the early nineties we averaged around 600 block hours per pilot. That number us now around 800 hours. The problem however is that we are still at the bottom relative to the industry in productivity. You can blame SWAPA for that. The industry made huge gains in quality of life. Almost every contract was a step forward. Then along came a airline ignored at first that flew their pilots to FAR maximums. Soon they achieved critical mass and the reckoning started. Quality of life began to suffer the death by a thousand cuts for the sake of competing with SWA. Even with the givebacks they were far more productive. They could go into any legacy market at will and do well. They sustained 10% growth year after year and soon became the largest domestic airline in the US. The axe fell on the legacies via the 1113 process and we all started working more like the SWAPA model. This was followed by the end of growth at SWA since they could no longer take market share at will. Why so many Delta pilots seem to hold SWAPA as a paragon of what a union should be eludes me!