Originally Posted by nopac6

Nonsense. There's no reason United couldn't come out of this 40 to 50% smaller than we are now and still be a viable business. Your threat of liquidation is absurd. And this fixation with the idea that furlough rate is somehow limited because of TK capacity is also ridiculous.

Many people on this board don't seem to be grasping the severity of this situation. This is NOT a slowdown or a recession. This is a total collapse of air travel as a business. Hopefully it's temporary, but no one knows. Even if it is temporary, the damage being done to individuals' and business' ability to spend is breathtaking and unprecedented.

United reported that we flew 550,000 passengers a day in March 2019. In March 2020, we flew 27,000 per day! Our traffic right now is down 95%! AA and DL are reporting similar numbers. These figures are also corroborated by TSA's figures of how many passengers are being screened each day at US airports. Also down more than 95%.

United just announced that they're adjusting the May schedule to be only 10% of last May's schedule. All other things being equal, that means we probably only need 100 airplanes to fly our entire schedule! 30 widebodies and 70 narrowbodies maybe? Do you guys really think that on October 1st they're going to start GRADUALLY working their way down to proper staffing levels for 100 airplanes when we're currently staffed for 700 airplanes? If traffic doesn't increase dramatically between now and then, they're gonna attack this operation with a f'ing meat cleaver, and that includes pilots.

People who think they'll be limited to a certain amount of furloughs because of their limited ability to train displaced pilots are delusional! They could furlough 5000 pilots on October 1st and not have ANY trouble still operating 100 airplanes' worth of flying. If they thought they were going to be short of narrowbody FO's after that furlough, they could displace and train several hundred of them before October 1st even gets here. All the rest of the 1000's of displacements could be done over the next year or two.

Cadetdrivr, your quote: "UAL will need to displace and train more senior pilots before the most junior ones can be furloughed." is completely false. That's how things work in a normal slowdown. What we're dealing with now doesn't even remotely resemble a normal slowdown. You don't "gradually" work your way from staffing for 700 airplanes down to staffing for 100 airplanes. You do it quickly or you end up in chapter 11.

Will we still be flying only 27,000 pax per day in October? Who knows? Even if it's twice or three times that, the point I'm making here is still valid. If people think the company is going to continue to absorb the cost of thousands of reserve pilots being paid 73 hours per month for not flying, they're just not thinking clearly.