I remember walking through the terminal as a little kid and seeing Southwest Airlines taxi by for the first time. I asked a legacy pilot about the airline with the funny paint job that I had never seen before. His somewhat angry response, "Some low cost bottom-feeder." "The pilots there can't get hired anywhere else." I asked why. He said, "most have criminal backgrounds, didn't go to college or they have DUIs." "Can you believe they don't even get a retirement over there?"
Although I was a little too young to really understand much of what he was saying, I got the gist of it. As I got a little older, I heard essentially the same thing about the pilots at FedEx and UPS from other pilots I spoke with.
Oh, how things change. That conversation has always stuck with me. Post September 2011, as the legacy carriers took massive hits to their CBAs, all I could think about were the "misfits" that were at the top of the industry.