Originally Posted by Viperstick

Duvie,

In another post, I said exactly that--we should "call" Kirby's bluff. Yes, demand is currently in the crapper and is likely to remain so for awhile. However, we still need pilots to fly and the Guppy is our most prevalent airframe.

The Guppy TI manning is the true bottleneck. As you correctly identified, furloughing as deeply as threatened would have decimated Guppy TI manning and drawn out the movement of pilots from more senior fleets/seats to the Guppy and exacerbated cash burn. My argument all along has been Kirby could not have furloughed to the threatened 3900+ (perhaps not even to the WARNed 2850) without severely drawing out the retraining process--exactly why we have United pilots manning TK instructor positions. I believe what we actually did was trade away a contractual furlough protection (having line pilots staff TK who are under the furlough gun) to save near term furloughs in exchange for reduced MPG and the ability to run TK at full bore until the manning problem is solved. You've got the very junior part of the list now happy to keep their job for another eight months, but you just put a big target on the backs of those at the top of the bottom tier and the bottom of the middle tier for next summer that arguably either wouldn't have been there or would have been there later (and while still drawing full MPG in the meantime). Oh, and we just paid the carry cost for the unneeded pilots until next summer.

A theory? Yes, but I believe there's ample evidence to support this being more than the ravings of a lunatic. First, TK recently put out a job announcement for 30-50 new Guppy TIs, purportedly for the return of the MAX, but 30-50 is pretty close to the number of TIs that will be furloughed under recent threats. Second, the TA specifically incentivized Guppy (and Sparky) guys to downgrade to the other seat, rather than the Bus or 756, by offering pay freezes at their old seat rate. Why? Logically, to reduce the training footprint of these downgrading pilots and thus help TK throughput.

Ultimately, we'll find out if we won a big stupid prize next summer. We've already played the big stupid game.