Originally Posted by alfaromeo

Just so you don't go off on the personal attack tangent, I am in the top 15% of the Delta seniority list and I have nothing to gain from this or actually any further seniority integration in the future. So just leave that out of your equation.

You think it is important that the West and East had separate operations over the last 9 years. Here are some questions for you. How many network management teams did US Air have during that time? How many central reservation phone numbers did they have? How many frequent flier programs did they have? Was there any way a passenger who bought a ticket on US Airways could tell if they were on a West plane or an East plane?

I don't know the base history at AMR over the last decade, but I am sure that some bases have grown and some have shrunk or even been eliminated. When a base shrunk, did the pilots at that base have to go to the bottom of the AMR list when they were displaced? Why not?

Just because the pilots were operating separately, it did not change the central fact that there was one management team serving one customer base. Whether or not flying got shifted from one US Airways base to another meant nothing to that management team, the exact same as what happened at AMR. In 2005 the East and West merged. After that time, there is no way to sort out their individual career expectations or the individual fates of their pre merger airlines; they were irretrievably altered for all times into the future.

So your statement that the East and West expectations were not changed by the merger is ludicrous on its face. The East pilots were in Chapter 11 with no cash, no reorganization plan, no hopes for the future, and it is clear they were headed to liquidation. The fact that they exist now is solely due to the merger. Maybe America West would have gone out of business too, who knows. But to say both of their career expectations have not been changed by the merger is just ignorant.

SLI integrations are about trying to meld together PRE-MERGER expectations. Go back to arbitrations 20, 30, or 50 years ago and you will see the validity of that observation. You might want to do some actual research of actual arbitration results before you go spouting off with your ideas. You like to refer to the UAL/CAL SLI integration, why don't you tell me what those arbitrators had to say about CAL's attempt to cash in on their supposed gains in the three years after their merger. I will give you a hint; they said that the merger closed in October 2010 and anything that happened after that was the result of a single merged airline. It simply didn't matter what occurred after that time. Oh, and who was the head arbitrator in that case? Well I think it was Dana Eischen, a name that should become much more familiar to you in the near future. But hey, I am sure it will work out differently in your case.

So you can place my opinion in whatever category you want. I can at least say I have directly observed multiple seniority arbitrations and have studied every seniority arbitration dating back to the 1960's. I am not a lawyer and I don't give legal opinions, I can just read what has happened numerous times in the past and guess what will happen into the future. Your opinions lack any basis in historical fact and seem mostly to be generated on what would be best for you.

This is not about pleasing parties. The West pilots had rights; rights that were established with the Nicolau award. Those rights were NEGOTIATED away. If the end result of that negotiation, however decided, do not match the rights they had before, they have a ripe DFR case and the parties that will pay damages are APA and AMR. This is not about making people happy, it is about contractual rights that were negotiated away. Tell me what the courts said in Rakestraw vs. ALPA and the associated seniority cases that followed. Give me that report and then study the following seniority cases and let me know your opinion after that.

If you are going to give amateur legal advice, at least do some study before offering it. Clearly you have not read anything of significance that relates to this case and are just making it up on the fly.