Originally Posted by
Mesabah
It's career expectations; Losing seniority in a merger is horrifying, ask me how I know..... It's even more horrifying when the person who is going ahead of you makes considerably less, and was always going to make less. ALPA merger policy is broken in this regard, you can't have regionals with mainline in the same union, it simply doesn't work. There is zero chance of the regionals going away so long as ALPA represents us, because every merger will be seen as a seniority grab, even if it's not. Thus ALPA can not even begin to fight to take back any of that flying. They can simply just hold the line, and hope the market eliminates that flying by itself. The problem with this though is the market only appears to be eliminating Delta's regional flying, due to the arrogance of mainline. It's going to be interesting to see what Delta does, but they have already RFP'd a lot of flying, and there are no takers. Meanwhile, hundreds of our guys flock to AA, and UAL's regionals, resetting their longevity in the process.
Yes, DAL is only going to hurt themselves in the long run. I fully believe they are very much a house of cards. I do not believe they will be doing well 5-10 years from now.
Meanwhile, they are hiring military fighter pilots with no airline or crew experience, regional FOs who are connected or meet the right demographics, and regional captains right at 1000 hours PIC. Experienced regional Captains above 3000 PIC need not apply, because they are viewed as "untrainable", "undesirable", and too set in their ways. Nevermind that this was the competitive mins in the last hiring cycle. And these Captains who aren't good enough to fly DAL passengers from the right seat of a 110 seat B717 are just fine to fly DAL passengers from the left seat of a 76 seat CRJ900 on the exact same route. Oh the irony.
Yes, if DAL keeps it up, AA and UAL will have cornered the pilot labor market. But hey, they can hire who they want I guess. As the hundreds of signs in ATL say "World's Greatest Employees". Even the 22 year old female MD88 copilot who never commanded an airliner, but now has better career expectations than the 20 year airline captain.