Originally Posted by
iaflyer
About ten years ago we used to have SILs posted somewhat regularly in the winter for wide bodies. Like you said, it provided some cost savings - maybe not tons but some. A year ago it the company was trying to save every penny as refunds rushed out the door. Why not take the cost savings and tell the other departments "we need every penny" and focus on their departments for cost savings too?
Optics be dammed - we needed to save money. And SIL would have been voluntary and saved money. What's not to like about it? You could have not taken a SIL and still had your nice check. Also, it would of provided a intermediate solution between PLOA and a full paycheck for those who wanted some time off but didn't want to lose their whole paycheck.
In the end, Ed torpedoed it and ended up paying a lot of pilots to sit around, only to spend MORE money to displace them, train some of them, and reinstate them. Now we've got maybe 1500 NQAT (150 from the old AE and all the UNA) pilots ALL being paid to sit around while the seriously overwhelmed training department tries and figures it out.
SIL’s for those 60 days would have had little or no impact on current training. Even if we extended the SIL program it would have had a very minor impact. It’s not likely SIL’s would have been a player at all after the cares act passed. Delta’s training load stems from two things. A very generous and over subscribed early out program. The take rate caught the company by surprise. The second thing was the complete elimination of the 777 and MD88/90 categories along with a restructuring of the 7ER category. We can debate how smart the attempt to restructure a massive part of the airlines fleet overnight was but regardless the restructuring and early out are driving 95% of the training load. Just the ER program probably resulted in over 9000 training events using 5 events per pilot removed from the top. I don’t see many posters busting the company over not restricting the early out program to a smaller number of pilots.