This Townhall was a showcase of the best and brightest from Flight Ops. Not impressed. Absolutely no leadership qualities here. JL's tone of voice is irritated, he lacks any sort of compassionate straight talk, and doesn't even bother to try keeping morale up. As bad as the situation is, he has never wasted the opportunity to overplay the negatives while not even bothering to mention even the slightest piece of good news. He has such a lack of connection with pilots it's almost as if he isn't one.
RG makes no attempt to be anything other than what they pay him for, to be the bad guy.
BS is just a nice guy who's orchestrating the plan that management wants. That is to eliminate every cent of pilot payroll possible outside of PWA concessions.
If there's a bright spot it's PB. He's genuine, and smart. We can only hope he sticks around and is promoted. Closest thing to SD I've seen at Delta.
This was absolutely the least substantiative TH so far, so probably a good thing that it was also the shortest. Delta's strategy is clearly more sheepish than our competitors. They are happy to give our competition a leg up during the recovery as long as we cut the leanest now, and burn less cash than anyone else. Future bookings simply aren't available at Delta like they are with other large carriers. Passengers who want to fly Delta will have to fly other carriers in June, July, and August, because Delta is simply not gonna spool up flights until a large percentage of passengers are ready to fly. They must feel they can recapture all of this flying further down the road. But no question, they are trying to stop bleeding cash at the expense of future bookings.
The townhall also made clear a couple things:
In determining how many pilots to furlough, the date they chose was the end of 3Q2021.
We now understand what the UNA thing is about. The problem with displacing 3,000 pilots to the 717 is that each displacement has to be re-trained in inverse seniority order. Under our contract, they would have to train the most junior guy first(who they know they will furlough) before they eventually get to the guy who will not be furloughed and who will need to be training by Oct 1st when 2,500 pilots leave the system. The only way to get all this training done in time for Oct 1, is to move all of the future furloughs out on unqualified status so they can displace and immediately begin training the pilots they will actually need.
Unless I'm missing something, if they can get this training done by Oct 1st, I don't see why they can't let the vast majority of these pilots go pretty fast.
They are using every tool within the PWA to be in position to release the maximum amount on Oct 1st. Not really a surprise.
Based on the sentiment I'm feeling as each week passes, and with the markets holding so strong over the past few weeks, I really am starting to believe that Delta's models are too pessimistic. Even with no Vaccine or Treatment, Americans are simply making peace with the risk and are showing very early on that they plan to carry on with their lives with some modified behavior.
It's like the GI that just gets shipped into a combat zone. Doesn't sleep for the first week. After 5 weeks, guy has torn his sleeves off and is playing volleyball in the middle of a rice paddy. At some point, you just become numb.