Originally Posted by TOGA LK

I am seeing a few things out of context here.

Anderson focused on shrinking DL NWA his first five years after the merger. Around C2012 he attended a LCA meeting and said," Guys Delta is a 10,000 pilot airline."

He had a chance to sunset the Alaska codeshare that NWA brought but instead chose to expand it. Remember when we dropped all those Hawaii destinations? Skywest and Alaska at our gets on the other side of the country? Remember ALPA telling us they are good for our operation because management says so? Tim O pushing the agenda... Network meetings about how there are no margins in the northwest? Network comments about only x% of Delta passengers codeshare from MSP to GEG?

Then Delta ended up with some bad slots in HND and without a dance partner in Japan. We tried to steal JAL but they stayed with BK AA. In a very short period of time the yen collapsed and our coveted fifth freedom rights were marginalized. The bottom line is we have a diminishing Asian presence without SEA.

Then came the first issue, domestic feed for a SEA super hub that will overfly now defunct NRT. The first choice was Alaska. Remember "SEA is not hub", LAX is an AS carveout in Section 1 and "Delta is a 10,000 pilot airline" then staffed under 12,000 and shrinking.

The problem was Delta needed a lot of feed to do this and Alaska arranged for an unprecedented number of MRJs at Skywest. But the writing was on the wall. UAL took deliveries of 787s and AA would schedule to open a LAX 787 operation with point to point into China. Delta now well on the backside of the power curve needed two things. They needed feed and to slow AA down by reducing their feed, remember they had just closed SFO.

Alaska showed preference to AA because of their JAL alliance and that is when Anderson's outsourcing attempt failed dead in its tracks. He quickly realized he made the same mistake as Pan Am, he could not secure the domestic feed.

Here we are six years after a merger, we almost have 100 narrow body (not counting 757/767) FOs on the entire west coast and there is a major growth announcement in SEA. Anderson learned a valuable lesson about where his alliances are, how important controlling your feed is and at the same time his own employees are his best offense; this was not his Plan A.

People, please don't loose sight of the fact that we as pilots have zero control over any of this, ALPA has a national strategy and almost exclusively carries the company's propaganda.

This could all change tomorrow. I wish all the best.