I must disagree with anyone that believes an in-house Union is the answer to decertification. Although in-house unions are a viable alternative for larger companies, our operation does not support this option. Like it or not Union representation within the airline industry is a must, and no Union has ever been a panacea.

For anyone that worked at a regional, I completely understand how disillusioned you must be with ALPA representation. To be perfectly honest ALPA cannot represent the major airline and at the same time represent the regional as this is a huge conflict of interest. But having said that, Kalitta is not a regional, we are our own airline that is currently in the process of significant growth.

I have worked for an ALPA carrier company and obviously for one represented by the Teamsters. Hands down ALPA is vastly superior to Teamsters, but the question that must be asked is why. This is because ALPA does not have Locals, they have Councils. What are Councils, they are our guys representing our pilots, ALPA does not try to come into our company and tell us what to do. We decide how we should proceed based upon the knowledge of what our pilots want and need. So why is this important, because ALPA will not work against us to further someone else’s agenda, they work with us as we address our issues.

With all due respect and to be brutally honest you do not get this right, the union did not lead us to an industry leading contract, our negating team led us to an industry leading contract. It would have been nice if our union had not worked against our pilot group and the negating team.