Originally Posted by
pabguanas
Dear Silver pilots,
Today marks the first day that our current leadership has advised us all to get our resumes out and jump ship. This is an unprecedented day as our current union leader has always been the one to encourage us to stay strong. We all knew the day was coming and its finally showing its face in the horizon.
I was one of the few people to have faith in this place but I too agree with our union that this place is going down and going down fast.
I’m sure that most of you would be wondering what sources I have for these claims, and I will address them one by one. Please bear in mind that I am just a pilot for this company and a lot of the facts that I’m writing down are from my personal opinion and observations.
for starters, VPAA decided to hire one of the dumbest CEOs of aviation history, having bankrupt several other companies in the past, he very irresponsibly made decisions that would be sure to fail in the long term and he knew it, he wasted the investors’ money like no one’s business, and he did a darn good job of it. Then they hired yet another winner who had no idea how to run a company like silver with such a tight budget, to his defense our first CEO left a mess that was very hard to get out of. Clearly the second CEO saw that this place was hopeless and decided to jump ship as well. Our new CEO has no experience as CEO and he is left with a mess of epic proportions. It would take nothing less than a miracle for him to turn this place around in 5 months.
you might ask why 5 months? Well from the beginning our investors talked about a 5 year plan, this plan started in March of 2011, meaning that Silver airways fiscal year starts and ends every March.
the reason I say 5 more months, it’s because it is my belief that our investors don’t want to push silver airways for a 5th year. With last year’s devastating blow of extreme losses through out, they decided to secure yet another loan with a company that specializes in the following;
taking struggling companies and gutting every single asset for a profit.
why would VPAA partner up with a company that specializes is such practices? Well silver owns several of the saab fleet and they have a bunch of assets that they can liquidate for profits, and this other company makes MILLIONS doing just that.
Next, VPAA has dropped to much money into this place and so far silver has shown 0 profits. As an investor, you have to make a business decision to either keep bleeding money or pulling the plug and take your loses. VPAA owns several gigantic companies that are profiting millions, in my opinion why would they want to have a company that all its doing is bleeding? All the business plans that they had in place have failed terribly thus far.
Some might suggest, “they can file for chapter 11 and re-structure this place and start from scratch”, yeah that could make financial sense, and history has proved that in the airline business filing for chapter 11 has been proven to work. However let’s look at the reality of the situation. This people invested millions of dollars out of their own pocket to start silver, so it’s their own money we are speaking of. Who in the right mind would file chapter 11 on their own debt? I would understand if they owed banks and other financial institutions of that sort, but its their own personal debt, for them to want to get rid of it, will only be hurting themselves.
They can also try to sell the place, but who will be willing to invest in a fleet of old airplanes ? I see it every day, everywhere we fly to, there’s always a saab that’s grounded. Our airplanes spend more time broken than in the air. Who ever made the decision of buying old old airplanes and making them look “pretty” surely had their head up their behinds. Again, a great move by our first CEO.
The sad part about this is that even if we were fully staffed we don’t have the equipment to do the job. You can have all the pilots in the world but if you don’t have an airplane is kind of hard to run a business.
which brings me to my next point, we can’t hire any type of quality pilots. We are barely scraping the bottom of the barrel. People want to blame the training department, but the reality is that these guys claim they can fly, (maybe flight simulator 1995), but in reality these folks have NO reason to be in the flight deck of ANY airplane.
top that with McDonalds competitive wages for FOs (about 1200) the very few that make it are now faced with the reality of very poor quality of life and scrapping to survive financially.
so now you think that pilots have it bad… you can go across every department of this company and everyone is miserable and worried about the future of this place. Every single person here is now jumping ship! And the few that are staying are already preparing for the inevitable.
Today’s call brought up a good point that I had also failed to realize, the company has NO plan for the near future, much less the long term. Why? Why have a plan when March is just around the corner? The chair of this company will pull the plug of this place once he sees that for 4th year straight this place has produced nothing more than loses across the board.
base closures, fleet reduction, flight reductions, all these are the typical signs of a dying company. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone who has business backgrounds. Management is desperately trying to show some sort of profits at the cost of everything and anyone. But one thing they failed to take into account is that now winter is approaching, like death on the side of a dying patient in a hospital bed. Airplanes that can’t shot a simple GPS approach as useless as an airplane is the desert. If you are not even legal to dispatch an airplane for the lack of being able to shot approaches is just like fighting a war with a blade of grass. Come December, January, February, with cancellations across the board due to weather, it will be the dagger that this place needed for March.
guys, don’t keep your hopes up here, leave NOW! Come march 220 pilots will be out looking for work and that’s 220 people you will be competing against. Not to mention now the demise of American eagle as well. Good luck to you all.