Wow. This is why I've always said that we as a group need to live below our means at all times. Living paycheck to paycheck, especially at 6 figures+ income level, makes someone extremely dependant and unable to walk away from anything, which only weakens our collective position and costs us all money in the long run.

This TA is more money for most of us (unless you get an unverifiable illness in your rolling window that you have to verify, then it could end up being a 100% pay cut) but it comes with some harsh concessions that are completely unwarranted at this time.

I'm also not pie in the sky bullish about the economy and am well aware of the capacity on the way from ME3, LCC's and others, even as legacies try to scrap to gether a percent or two of recently abandoned capacity back in. The dollar and debt bubbles are real and significant, and there are some downright shocking soverign debt land mines out there that we're simply going to be walking over. No way around it.

So maybe profits have peaked. They don't always go up; they can't always go up. But so what. In every scenario short of armageddon we are still going to be profitable. More profitable than the C2K days, and more profitable than the C2012 days. If our profits are cut in half we will still exceed the previously most profitable times in our history by a wide margin. So smooth sailing ahead or a rough ride, there is still absolutely no need for these levels of concessions.

Oh and if the company or the union is even remotely concerned about sustainability, where is the outrage on the ridiculous 5B additional buybacks? If we ever are in another position of dire economic headwinds, which we will be at some point anyway knowing this industry, we will look back at these wasteful do nothing buybacks as our Waterloo. The amount was not only radically excessive, but it was done out of emotion and very very short term and short sighted greed without any regard whatsoever to the economics this industry operates in. It was burned right in front of us just so we couldn't have a small portion of it. Where's the roadshow slides on that?