Originally Posted by
Paid2fly
According to your own "statistics", that's a total of 87 aircraft, plus all the new 175's and 900's that AA needs to keep flying for their feed. IF PSA and PDT had voted NO, joining Expressjet, Envoy, Silver and Republic in doing so, management would not have been able to place all 87 A/C PSA and PDT currently fly along all the future A/C deliveries with any other carriers. There just isn't enough slack in the regional system anymore, pretty much every carrier than can find new hires is already running at maximum capacity with available classrooms and sims.
First of all XJT, Silver, and Republic cannot be grouped with Eagle, PDT, and PSA because they are not wholly owned. Their no votes were a lot easier to cast than Eagle, PDT, PSA. If you do not understand the reason behind this then we do not need to be having this conversation in the first place.
As far as the 87 A/C, that number is not correct because those groups did not vote at the same time. If PSA had voted no a year ago AAG would've only had to shift 49 acft. They have proven themselves capable of doing this with the Eagle 700 transfer. Mesa would've had no problem staffing those 49 acft plus the 30 900s as proven by PSA's recent recruiting success staffing the mentioned 30 900s plus Eagle's ill gotten 700s.
Your union has (incorrectly) convinced your pilot group that regionals cannot staff their flying. Fact is that people will flock to an airline that is growing in the hope of a fast upgrade/flow. Think what you want about the morality behind that situation but that doesn't change the fact that it is reality right now.
Lastly, AAG has known for quite a while that PDT's Dash 8s were going to time out. To think this was not in their business plan is folly. PDT was in an even more difficult position than PSA due to the fact that their acft could not legally be operated past 2017ish.