Originally Posted by
CALFO
I think this is a bit optimistic. Regardless, whatever is left of the 756 will probably be in EWR and IAD. Here is my guess as to what happens next.
The company has an empty schoolhouse, is extremely overstaffed, and has no choice but to pay the salary of every pilot until October:
Bid 1: Close 756 BES for SFO, LAX, IAH, ORD. Reduce EWR and IAD 756 by 30 percent. Also, trim off the bottom 20% of SFO 777 FO to force the 756 FO'S into the bus or guppy. Send all Captains that bid to 737/320 to training. Send the more senior FO's that bid to 737/320 to training.
Bid 2: Reduce the overstaffing in the 777 and 787 caused by the 756 displacements. Train only the CA's and the senior FO's that bid down to NB. Also train the senior CA/FO's that went to WB
Bid 3: Displace from 320 BES'S and 737 BES's to achieve balance and to address the CA overstaffing as necessary. Train the CA and the senior FO's.
Bid 4: Furlough as needed.
End result is that the company has saved itself the trouble of slowly bleeding the 756 fleet over the next few years. The cost is minimal, as you have to pay all salaries until October 1. If you want to furlough in mass in October it will be much easier to do as the replacement pilots are either trained, in training, or on deck. If thinks have improved, then a minimal (or zero) furlough and you take delivery of the 737 MAX aircraft with pilots in place.
Every time there is a displacement, pilots are going to go to a category that is best for them. I believe you are going to see a lot of 756 FOs bid the 777 or 787 category because they know they will be bumped on a future round. Most 756 Captains can not hold widebody, and many that can have already decided they aren’t flying it, so they will mostly be bidding 737 or Airbus Captain, causing about 600 overages in those fleets. Now you have REAL problems. As you bump more Captains on the NB fleets, those pilots are ALL going to bid WB FO. This creates numerous rounds of bumping now, since even the bases won’t have the right numbers of pilots. It won’t take long for people to learn how to play the bumping game. You will have people bumping into categories that they know there will be no way they will end up holding. After 9/11 we had 727 Captains who it took 6 months or more of displacement before ever going to TK. They went from 727 Captain, to Airbus Captain, to 737 Captain to 747-400 FO, to 777 FO to 767 FO. Even a year after 9/11 the schoolhouse was still going full speed retraining. The record I am aware of is someone got trained on 3 planes in about 5 months. Also the company was offering SRLs well into 2003, more than a year and a half after we park a bunch of planes.
The contract is designed to make displacing extremely costly to the company so they mitigate it as much as possible. The only thing that will really help is if they chop a bunch of people off of the top of each category through an early retirement similar to American’s. Here’s why...if they decide to furlough 2,000 pilots, that means the remaining 11,000 pilots are a sunk cost. They have to pay us, and they don’t really care which seats we are in. Any churn among the remaining 11,000 “sunk cost” pilots are excess costs. American recognized that and was able to get over 600 pilots to leave. Even if they are WB pilots that’s fine, because as they train new WB pilots, they pull them from NB seats in which they are going to be over, keeping them from not bumping in those categories, whether CA or FO.