Originally Posted by
Hedley
The 90-120 days is per contract for actual furlough, not the warn. 3900 furloughs is right in line with their long-standing 30% reduction number. When bookings and revenue are as low as they are, “only” furloughing 3900 leaves a bunch of pad for the flexibility that they want when the recovery actually starts. Im afraid that the 2250 will be cut as fast as they can, and the rest to follow training capacity at TK. That is of course until they realize that they should have started recalling 6 months prior and scramble to reverse the process.
We shall know soon. SK has always wanted to be aggressive since he's been here. How competitive can we be on the recovery if we have 3900 pilots on the street vs only 1600/1900 at our main competitors?
Furloughing 3900 is essentially equal to 5000 when you figure in 1100 mandatory retirements over the next couple of years. Do you think we can recover in any sort of efficient fashion by cutting that deeply? It will be a very cumbersome process to undo all the displacements and retrain the furloughed pilots, even with the shorter requal training footprints that are currently approved.
I think this is the reason why ALPA and the company are in mitigation talks. TK is already jammed up with the very few displacements they've already begun to train. They've realized that furloughing such a massive amount is just not practical or cost efficient to be positioned properly for a recovery, which (let's be honest) no one has a clue of when it may happen.
The only way I can see 3900 as a feasible furlough number is if there are merger plans on the horizon.