Originally Posted by
sky jet
I'm sure there were things in that contract that the pilots didn't catch when it was negotiated. There are always a few gotcha's that slip through on both sides. If a judge ruled against the pilots on this it would essentially render any contract negotiated open to endless revision. I can't imagine a judge wanting to allow that kind of chaos. Even if the ruling only applied to airline labor it could send the airline industry into a tailspin. Can you imagine what the old US Airways Easities would do with a ruling like this?
There is a complication. The section at issue was, as I recall, one of the 4 that was decided by arbitration. So if the ruling from the arbitrator at the time was a,b,c; and the contract somehow ended up saying a,b,c,d; that is a different ball of wax than your normal management/labor squabble.
That said, the language was much talked about at the time. This is not some musty corner of the contract, and I have a hard time believing that it was somehow missed by the lawyers.
In any case I suspect that this is a bit more complex than the crew room understanding.