Sorry Work4life, but you aren’t the only guy with shiny combat medals around. Plenty of us at VX too. Nearly all of us have degrees as well, multiple in my case, and have been flying for 20-30 years. When I got hired at VX after spending a decade in Boeing’s the minimums to get on was 7,000 hours, 10,000 plus made you competeive. They needed such high time to keep the insurance rates down, and guys fresh out of the military frankly weren’t qualified. So when posters paint us as undesirables and question why guys who lost their jobs didn’t go elsewhere at a time when no one else was hiring—a fact pilots with a few decades worth of experience know—it undermines the poster’s credibility. ... I personally think this whole thread is absurd. The concepts of objectivity and critical thinking have been lost. What the panel will weigh in terms of windfall is pre-SLI quality of life and how the ISL affects it. Decisions made, and the luck or lack of it that brought each of us to this point are immaterial. Business decisions concerning the acquisition are also immaterial. It comes down to preserving pre-ISL QOL as best they can, while paying homage to the other factors like longevity, upgrade potential, etc. It won’t be 70-30 and it won’t be 15-85. It’ll be somewhere in the middle of the two because both sides can validly argue their points and tear down the other side.