Originally Posted by O2pilot

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.