At first, I was like you I thought the TA was terrible. I decided to spend hours upon hours over several days reading it and comparing it to our current CBA and the CBA's of other mainline operations.

The company wanted PBS from the start. That was in the presentation. Naturally, with PBS comes loss of transition, and while transition is great, it's not guaranteed consistently to most of the pilot group. I have gotten some transition conflicts in my limited time here and I was really only able to capitalize on it once. It was great when it worked, but I generally bid for days off, since I have a family. I'd rather have the much higher guaranteed income without having to hope for transition. Guarantee at the new rate, plus the DC, still pays me more than crediting 100+ hours. And I know I'll get that every month, which makes for an easier budget.

There is still no airport standby. They have to be in the process of rescheduling you. I do hate this, and don't think it should be in the TA, but it cost them money to do this. I could be wrong, but I don't think they'll go crazy with it because of the costs. Plus, you can get out of it by the mention of one word.

Most of the rescheduling language is in the current CBA, and most of what was added protects us and gets us paid. If I'm at work, I don't really care if I end up in LAX or BOS for the night. Just don't mess with my days off, and they aren't. In fact, the new rigs will probably give me a couple of more days off every month. The big difference is, now they don't have to return you to your trip. Big deal, just get me home on time.

Losing the ability to drop RES days really hurts, but after May the company was committed to taking that ability away and the NMB was completely in their corner. This was the casualty of the TRO.

The hotel change was at the request of The Union. Guys complain all the time about the length of some of these drives. They actually listened and did something about it.

I'm not naive, I do not think the concessions are only 64 million, and if you watched the video, that's just an estimate. However, I do think if you think this is a cost neutral contract then you are naive. I think where they will save the biggest is reduced pilot labor and they can't really calculate that. I do think an order will be announced sometime in the next year, and if that happens no one here will feel the ability of PBS to reduce staffing.

Do I think it's perfect? No. But let's look at what we're taking away from this: major scope improvements, a respectable income, a DC 401K, higher min duty period, trip and duty rigs, training pilots section has improvements for them, we get our schedules earlier, LTD, keeping our red/green system and our four days off between trips - and if you want to wave that you can.

You always preach education, yet you seem to not care about it yourself.