Originally Posted by
LateToTheParty
Staffing is just one side of the coin. The jets weren't flying enough. United will say it's because they weren't staffed properly. But prior to 4-5 weeks ago we were hiring pilots like crazy for an 18 month period. There were classes scheduled through April/May. No one suddenly realized "Oh ****, we're upside down on Captains!" as if it was some secret we were paying bonuses to FOs to get them in the door all that time. What really happened was that flying was shifted away from TSA at the beginning of the year or sometime just prior. So much so that we couldn't pay the lease on the planes. I think we tried to get more flying from United. When they said no I think we tried renegotiating the rate we were getting paid for the flights they did give. When that didn't work we cancelled the Feb and later classes at the end of January. Then sometime around February 10th I think United notified both XJT and TSA that the planes were going to XJT. That's when the January class got canned. Many will say TSA did this to itself and good riddance to such a **** carrier run by hacks. I don't agree with that. I think TSA was essentially pushed off a cliff.
I think there's a lot of accuracy in this.
The company was doing a great job of filling classes over the past year and a half, and were
managing to fill newhire classes until the end (and classes full through May), but they had no incentives to retain the more experienced pilots, even our bonuses ran out, and you had newhire FOs making as much as captains that had been on property for a couple years. There was definitely a disparity between FOs and Captains, but much less exaggerated than management is leading on.
I disagree wth the "paying the lease" garbage. The XRs were United's, and their utilization was tied to the flying United gives and the efficiency if that flying (which markedly declined in recent months). Give us crap flying to cover = planes sitting around half the day at out stations = self-fulfilling prophecy.
There's plenty of holes in the story management paints. Clearly there was a ongoing discord between TSH and UAL. They refused to come to an agreement on the CPP and Aviate while both were stringing our pilot group along that we would get it "very soon". I'm sure that made United's decision to start consolidating the 145 fleet easier than if there had been a harmonic relationship. I'm sure everyone figured they could shut us down and sideline us to go to work for G7 and their 550 Experiment without the overhead costs and drama of a proper merger of the pilot groups.