Originally Posted by aa73

Yeah we do have some of those but we also have some where you do 3 legs, sit for 24, then a red eye back, that pay 15+.

That wasn't so much a product of the Yes vote. We haven't had 5hr min calendar day here since the 80s and apparently the membership never deemed it important enough with the '91, '97, and '03 contracts. It was never a high priority item for some reason. So my guess is voting No would have not changed that, as many LUS pilots who had worked under Parker had told me during the voting process: their take on it was that Parker would have been just fine keeping the $1.6B and keeping us on the old contract - which still didn't have 5hr min day.

Basically, thanks to the corner APA painted us into - the old cost-neutral arbitration backstop - Parker won with either a yes or no vote. He had no incentive to suddenly soften up and grant us wish list items with a no vote. Why would he? With a no vote, he'd become the darling of the arbitrators and we'd be susceptible to a contract modified by an arbitrator's interpretation of cost-neutral, minus a huge chunk of $$$. The JCBA was no Delta deal, where the company would be under pressure to deal with angry pilots: in our case, the company had a contract whether we voted yes or no. The no vote was even more lucrative for them, sparing them $1.6B and keeping us well below delta and united for the next several years.

The two LBFOs of 2012, however, did not have any cost neutral backstops and were a lot more similar to the Delta deal due to the leverage we had. As such, I was a No voter on both of them, based on the fact that we had a great opportunity to squeeze them. We did on #1 but not enough on #2, which passed.

So in this pilot's opinion, the 5hr min day was not going to become reality regardless of how we voted. Any proof of that, just look at how smoothly the operation ran over the Christmas and New Year period which was when we were all awaiting the company's response to the APA's modified demands - after Kirby basically told us to pi$$ off the first time.

Let's face it - we were neutered the day APA and AA signed the MOU. The JCBA vote, yes or no, was just a formality.