Originally Posted by
tom11011
Depends on your point of view though.
To date, the majority of pilots polled believe that regional airlines shouldn't even exist. About 85% believe this currently. A NO vote helps facilitate that belief. Regional airlines are a B scale, nothing more. The moment it becomes to expensive or burdensome to have regional airlines, the flying will be reabsorbed by the parent airline.
Now maybe your point of view is they should exist and if so, then there is something else to consider. Should one expect to be able to make a career at a regional or is it up and out?
Do you really think the pilots have any say at all in whether or not the regionals exist? If you do I think you're vastly overestimating your role in this machine. If contracts truly mattered to regional pilots not a single person would go to Mesa, but they're filling classes. As long as the mainline carrot exists there will be no shortage of pilots trading short term pain for PIC time and the shot at a major.
As to whether or not I believe the no voters thought there would be pain, I don't. I believe the no voters got caught up in the union propaganda of a pilot shortage. The reason I believe this is because a lot of the most vocal no voters are the ones now desperate for an "announcement". The pilot group made a calculated gamble given the information we had at the time. We lost the gamble, it's time to pay the debt.