Halfway through I had the strange sense that the class, in it's entirety, may have been conceived and constructed to recover from Smisek's "labor is not needed for this merger" statement of six years ago. It seemed to build into an almost holy view of the "professional," steeped in the history of guilds and service to fellow pilot and employee, a far cry from Smisek and Bethune trying to make all equally dispensable, no one is special, you're an easily replaced cog.

Maybe I was just reading too much into it.