Originally Posted by
pangolin
WHY? There’s zero benefit to united as a company to do this. The pilots at UA - great benefit. But as far as expense there’s no beating the regionals yet. No staffing issues now either. No bonus not problem.
By creating better utilization of the 70-76 seat fleet UA can use the block hours the 50 seaters were flying to move more pax without any sort of scope relief. Mesa has some very talented people in scheduling. They can take crap pairings and create highly efficient airframe use. I’m sure others can as well. Some 50 seat filler will remain.
That’s his point. United pilots get a jets for jobs type arrangement to throw the furloughs a bone. The trick is finding the leverage to give management something they want without slowing the FFD model elimination plan too much. The alternative is about three thousand United furloughs and nearly 2000 UAX furloughs into a no job environment.
Maybe just holding the line and destroying UAX next April makes the whole paradigm better in a decade but it’s a long time to wait for many of us and the lack of competitiveness hampers United compared to Delta and American.
It is a sticky problem and Mesa being dirt cheap makes no difference if scope block hour limits result in half their fleet being parked.
I should have been a firefighter. I’d be retiring this year.