....Scope and the Atlantic Joint Venture: DAL ALPA has allowed the company to “carve out” a joint venture from their scope section (a concession by itself) to allow them to “bundle” three partner airlines as one: Air France, KLM and Alitalia. This was done in April 2010. The terms of this agreement required DAL to fly a minimum of 48.5% of EASKs (Equivalent Available Seat Kilometers) as measured against the total ASKs of this JV. Believe it or not, the compliance “look back” period was 3 years, and if out of compliance the company was given another year to come into compliance. As you might imagine, management took full advantage of this deal and was out of compliance for 3years only flying 47% of the ASKs: this is equivalent to 9 daily A330 DTW-AMS round trips: how many jobs is that? Airplanes? Upgrades? QOL schedules?


What’s important to understand about joint ventures is that they are not code share arrangements even though they may include code share partners, rather an agreement to split total revenue from all operations at pre-determined amounts, many times regardless of who does the flying. Remember the Air Lingus/United deal? In that case United did zero flying but was entitled to a certain share of revenue and maybe as much as 50% or more from that operation. Our scope sections are the only protections we have against managements turning us into ticket brokers and DAL ALPA is giving away the house.



This DAL TA proposes additional concessions for this JV: they want to change the measuring stick from EASKs to Block Hours for starters. In other words an Air France A380 holds quite a bit more available seat kilometers than a DAL 767 or 757 but they each account for equal aircraft block hours. If management is receiving their money from this JV regardless of the amount of seats they fly, then of course they’d like to change the measuring stick and have one of the three Joint Venture partners put the seats in the market. Not only has this been championed by the DAL negotiators, but they also allowed management to carve out any flights to and from the UK allowing all flights to/from the UK flown by all partners in this JV to be excluded from the minimum block hour measurement matrix. A carve out from a carve out?