1. Company does not fear sport bidding. Regional airlines everywhere are facing a shortage of Captains. Our training center can handle monthly vacancies. Monthly vacancies will normalize projections, and management in this new era want realistic data and projections for planning. Maybe vacancies and flow-plan every quarter gave them that in the past. But It is taking much longer for management to respond & to plan when dynamics are changing so fast.

2. If sport bidding was going to be a concern, company legal & mgmt jargons full of subliminal threat, intimidation & HI6 msgs will be out in force with a anti-sport bidding campaign (similar to fuel savings campaign). Nobody wants to sport bid purposefully anyways. Sports bidding is essentially screwing fellow union pilots. It hurts those that want a specific bid status anyways.

3. We need more CAs on board via traditional means of vacancies. Not DEC/HVA programs. It has failed, and it’s time to MEGA. Peak summer flying is upon us in a few short months. AAG has the ability to quickly shift flying to SKYWEST and other non-WO FFD. We still want normalized flow, better flying, and base options.

What happened to more bases? We gave company the “flexibility” they wanted so “when” AAG comes knocking to open up a new base we are competitive. Company got what they wanted. We got metered flow, forced upgrades, and DEC—> HVA’s quickly after that.

No good news this spring.

Question: Is it possible for the company to run a monthly vacancy, but then every 3 months run a displacement to backfill shortcomings???