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
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?
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I was surprised to read that you were in the top 15% of the DL list. In our past exchanges I would have sworn that you were a junior west guy. Just goes to show how assumptions can be made.
All the points you made are true, and you may be spot on about your predictions. But a few facts remain. At the time of the MOU the two pilot groups were completely separate, with separate seniority lists, fleets and contracts. The MOU called for a nullity to all that came before. So how does the board determine our career expectations? There was a high probability that someday we would have been a combined seniority list, but when, and what would it have looked like then? What if AOL lost their last appeal and decided to come to a compromise? What if we hit hard times and US divested part of the airline prior to a joint seniority list, like Frontier? What if we hit really hard times and filed chapter 7? Lot's of scenarios, so what does the panel use?
Hopefully they won't use the massively damaged crystal ball that Nic did. Did you ever read the US/AW dispatcher arbitration and read how Bloch came to a completely different conclusion about the value of the two airlines? And if you follow the rest of the airline business as well as you do SLIs, then you know that the period of separate operations showed that Bloch's vision was better than Nicolau's. So the new panel will uphold Nicolau's flawed work, just because they respected him? You ever fly with a guy that you respected, but saw him make a mistake? Would you say it wasn't a mistake just because you respected him? BTW, a manager of pilot scheduling recently said that the sole west base, PHX, was carrying about 20% more block hours than is necessary, only to meet contractual obligations of the MOU. Maybe he will be called to testify in the arbitration.
I've mentioned potential pitfalls for the west pilots going into this as a separate entity. Do you see any?
So, you have tons of experience and might be helping the west. Why? What's your interest in this? Justice? Pay? ALPA loyalty? Just curious.
If you are an ALPA loyalist looking for payback, a few questions. If the only problem with the Nic was the east pilot's reaction, why did it cause so many changes in ALPA policy, and pilot SLIs in general? Why did 3 guys from ALPA national tell me that they knew the Nicolau award was screwed up and they would fix the problem, they just couldn't do anything for us? "Sorry guys."