Now you’ve gone and done it Denny . A couple of thoughts...

A large part of this conversation is generational and based on perception. Guys my age never had a pension to take and bankruptcy happened before we got the golden ticket so it’s hard to truly understand the difficulty of what you didn’t live through. That being said, guys retiring now have no idea just how devastating age 65 was for the RJ guys. They view it as an drop in the bucket compared to what was stolen, but for guys at the bottom of the ladder, being frozen in place for five years, often at literally food stamp wages was crushing. The regionals were supposed to be a place to get it, get your time, and get out; only now no one could get out for years.

Also like CX said, the prism through which old, retiring captains are viewed by their younger cohorts makes your argument an uphill battle no matter how sound the logic. I have yet to fly with a retiring guy (and I did several retirement flights last year) who was hurting. One had well over 10 airplanes, the most expensive of which was over a million dollars. The one guy who did complain about not being able to make it(and argue loudly for a DB) had a 2 million dollar house in Colorado. When that’s the picture we’re exposed to on the line, it’s very hard to generate an argument to overcome the perception that this is a money-grab. Emotion often trumps rational arguments.