Originally Posted by R57 relay

In defense of cacti(I know, it surprises me too), there is a bit of apples and oranges going on. What is "active"? If you notice in the above Nicolau doesn't use the word active for US pilots, he gives the total and furloughed. For AWA pilots, he says that they were all active. So I have to come to the conclusion that by "active" he means just not furloughed, as AWA had guys out on medical, MIL, etc. But we have a different definition of active because those out on medical, LOA, MIL and management are not active line pilots. If you are looking at total numbers of a seniority list it's hard to get an idea of the butts in the seat without going through the whole list. The east has a lot of medicals. But using the bid gives a pretty clear indication of what is available to the line pilot. I would imagine that we also carry a larger number of management and training pilots.

Looking at that, we have about 8% more line pilots today than we did the day the merger was announced. That while flying about 50 fewer hulls. I believe the difference is proper staffing, more IROs on the 330s, and training float.

The last paragraph you quoted is one of the mysteries to me about Nicolau. By the time he issued his award, that had already been proven incorrect. We recalled 300 pilots while shedding 50 hulls.