Originally Posted by
HPIC
There won’t be any LOAs. The company got 90+% of what they wanted. They have no incentive to agree to anything else.
Hiring will continue. People will continue to leave. There will never be a good level of experience in the operation in the bottom half of the seniority list because the turnover will be too high. Management will be fine with it.
We lost a 767 and 3 pilots. We almost caused the largest aviation disaster in history when our 747 full of pax almost collided with another 747 full of pax on approach. We almost lost a 747 in HKG..and possibly another in NRT. We had a 747 run off the side of a runway due to poor piloting technique. We bent a 767 full of pax on OE. These were fairly experienced crews…though obviously with some issues in some. We had a 777 with a 4 man crew(with maybe 8 years experience in company/aircraft when you add all 4 together) stall, or damn near stall(I never heard officially if they actually stalled or not) an airplane without anything wrong with it on departure at around 5k feet..
As experience levels continue to drop, both in new hires and upgrades, there will be more problems. We WILL lose another aircraft…it’s just a matter of when and where. Upgrade candidates are failing at alarming rates. New hires are failing at higher rates than ever before in my time here.
Atlas is going to be a wild ride for those that stay.
As our lead negotiator revealed today…”At the Miami Airport Marriott Conference room filled with about 300 instructors back around 2018 (I may be off by a year or so), John Dietrich answered a question asked about if he was concerned with attrition and the lack of a competitive contract. He said he was not. He said
his plans were to make sure Atlas Air always remained a place that pilots go work at who were unable to ever get a job working anywhere else that was better. The room fell silent in shock.”
JD made a very similar statement this year in testimony before the arbitrator. Mission accomplished for our CEO.
Atlas got a pass on the first crash. If attrition doesn't shut the airline down, when the next crash happens the FAA may have to shut the doors. They certainly will if God forbid we lose an aircraft with 400 military onboard or we put one into a metropolitan area. Atlas has dodged so many crashes over the years they’re on borrowed time, and the staffing situation that’s going to develop is going to speed up the clock.