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Old 08-31-2018, 08:54 AM
  #4  
cargowarrior
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Joined APC: Apr 2017
Posts: 29
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Originally Posted by JustOvIt View Post
I apologize for the delay in my reply to you, I was commuting to work from my home outside of Washington DC yesterday. Which brings to mind, first and foremost, one of your management team’s punitive and unfair practices toward ABX Air pilots: our lack of Known Crew Member status (which you do provide to ATI). Why else, but unreasonable distaste, would you cause it to be more difficult for some of your highest paid and most time critical employees to get to work every month?

I do appreciate your response to my letter to Mr. Maloney though it was not expected nor requested. My letter to him was in part related to several conversations John and I have had, one-on-one, in his office. Furthermore, you must excuse me if I am suspicious of your motivations in reply, as in my 23+ years with this company I have only once been asked for my input and then, only recently by John Maloney; rather, historically, quite the opposite has been the rule. You ask me in your closing line what I can do and what I am doing to bring ABX back. First, I’m not sure it can be brought back from where it has been allowed to fall, but beyond such evaluation, I have done all this company has asked of me to the best of my ability for my entire tenure. I have endured the same ups and downs you speak of but at a much more operational level versus your strategic level. While at this company, I have been surplussed from a captain position, furloughed entirely for eighteen months, taken pay cuts, been harassed by members of your management team (see HR for details), overcome antiquated and sometimes barbaric training methods and yet I remain, despite opportunities to go elsewhere. Secondly, I have offered my services to this company many times and been rebuked every time. I offered to become a standards pilot, I offered to help with Safety (as I was a Chief of Safety in the Air Force), I attempted to assist with attaining what this company erroneously calls CRAF flying and most recently I offered, Mr Soaper and Mr Maloney individually, the use of my extensive training and experience as an operational and strategic level planner to overcome the scheduling difficulties we have month after month. My impression has always been that your management team’s desire is for the pilots in general and myself in particular to simply acquiesce to whatever demands are placed on us. There is a lot of broad and valuable education, training and experience in this pilot group which goes apparently intentionally unresourced.

Let’s talk about what your management has done to ABX Air, the community, its shareholders and its employees, including the pilots: you have taken away what were our aircraft, our maintenance, our flight control then promptly charged ABX for the use of those same resources at artificially high rates. We pay some of the highest lease rates in the industry on the very aircraft you simply took from us. While I realize this is all done internally using ATSG dollars and not real money, it allows the less savvy to claim and believe ABX is far less profitable and valuable than it in fact is. You lease aircraft to our direct competitors and use our mechanics to maintain them. While others may believe dry leasing is more profitable than ACMI, I do not! Perhaps the profit margin is higher because your unit costs are lower, but the overall profit is higher with ACMI because you make a profit on each letter therein! If that were not the case, you would have shutdown both ABX and ATI long ago. As I stated in my letter to John, once we were mentioned in the same breath as FedEx and UPS. Now, after your accession to the top post, we are losing valuable assets and work to the likes of Kalitta, Atlas, ATI, Omni, NAC and the regionals! I’m not talking solely about pilots: Forsythe, Woodford, schedulers, loadmasters, and many others. We have fallen to the bottom of the ACMI scum bucket! It is clear to me, we are not even attempting to compete: in Miami, Los Angeles, or Europe; or for military charters. I personally saw a letter where UPS asked us to fly four trips for them last fourth quarter out of Köln and Miami, your management declined! The national economy and air freight business is better than it has been in decades, yet here we sit: shrinking and withering on the vine. How many more millions could you have earned for the shareholders, if we actually pursued or just accepted business opportunities now available to us. If at least some of these business decisions were not done out of hatred for the pilots, I fear far worse causality exists. Thousands of former Airborne Express employees nationwide lost their jobs, the city and community of Wilmington have been financially harmed severely, not once but twice in the last ten years, were you not at the helm for each and every one of those ten years? How much personal loss did you assume? How does your income compare today with 2008?
Yeah what he said!
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