If you analyze the numbers that they gave us, they want 10% from the entire company. About 500M dollars for 2021 with roughly half of that coming from the pilot group. That equates to about 1,000(11%) furloughs and 500 downgrades. We’re 20% overstaffed right now, but they can’t furlough based on right now.

I’m sure they don’t want to furlough any more than we do, but they want everybody to do their part and help. The problem is that we have a lot of leverage. They need pilots in order to recover from this. To furlough a pilot for a year there will be about 4 months wasted between furlough pay and retraining. And I’m willing to bet a year from now we will be properly staffed when factoring in VSP, EXTO and natural attrition....probably even calling back some EXTO’s. This is why pay cuts don’t make sense right now. I believe most pilots would be willing to take a deferment of 10% if the union signed off on the language in order to guarantee no furloughs and help the company recover faster. Payback in the form of stock sometime before share buybacks and dividends resume. This would prevent the bitterness that comes from the thought of sacrificing just to watch the shareholders see bigger gains.