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.
Regional longevity is always reset. That's just a fact of life. People that make a clean break from the military also experience a "reset". Lawyers, firefighters and accountants that become pilots push the reset button as well. So what. Its a long standing part of the foundation of the industry.
I still don't see why you keep predicting DL regionals, and only DL regionals, will collapse and everyone else's regionals will thrive and conquer. It check every box of the hubris test, yet you seem too smart and level headed to be in it that deep.
DL regionals are going to collapse, to the point of possibly collapsing DL, because AA and UAL are hiring DL regional pilots. But AA and UAL are going to do just fine even though DL is hiring thousands of pilots. Um, OK.
Its one thing to play the "pilot shortage!" card in general, but how exactly is whatever you predict going to slam DL and not the others? They're all kiting checks right now scrambling to hire eachother's regionals and no one wants that to not work more than me. But exactly how is this a DL problem and not equally an AA/UA/etc problem?