It was and is a huge windfall to the company. Really helped them to shore up the funding in the A plan especially since this occurred during the big down turn in the market.

If you figure someone works until 65 now and has 25 years at 60 already that is 5x$130k=$650K the fund did not have to payout per pilot! Plus any interest that was earned on it. That is no small amount. What did we get for that? A big zero! Once again we did it to ourselves.

I guess the then 53 and over did get their VEBA account which was to help with healthcare until medicare took affect. Now it is just a nice windfall $25K+ for them.