While I voted "No" on C2012 I thought the best part of the contract was its short duration - we are now in a position (even without pattern bargaining) to make some significant gains (my definition of significant is >10%/year increases in pay). The thing to remember (and this is why the company fights so hard to keep our pay and benefits down) is in order to keep other employee unions off the property the other employee groups benefit (almost directly) from any improvements in our contract. Because a number of things are unique to the pilots job we should look to increase our benefits in other areas - per diem, training pay, value of vacation day, more vacation for senior pilots, better pay for distributed training, etc. Although those by themselves will not make us whole it will improve our chances of an overall good contract.