Originally Posted by
duvie
As a post merger hire, I can be completely honest when I tell you that the reason Continental guys never called it “the guppy” was because many of them did not have a career expectation to ever leave it… Whereas most United pilots believed it was a rite of passage that they would graduate beyond. I’m not trying to be a jerk… But that’s the way it is/was. Furthermore, new hires are literally taught not to call it a guppy if they don’t know the person, because of the amount sensitivity the Continental folks feel. So if someone is not calling in a guppy in front of you, that is saying more about you than them.
there are plenty of idiosyncrasies that the legacy united guys and gals have (constantly feeling slighted by ATC, believing UAL was still the airline they got hired at 10 years ago, circa 2009)… But the guppy thing is certainly a glaring CAL one for everyone outside of the Ex-Con bubble. I’m on the WBs now… So if a continental captain wants to take me to pro standards when I read back the taxi instructions and call it a guppy… I suppose we can sort it out there
I was at CAL and the reason that they never called it the guppy is that it was a UAL thing and to be honest, most people outside of United hadn’t paid much attention to their cultural norms. It’s not that people expected to career the airplane, it’s just that they didn’t nickname every fleet. You were just on the 73, 75, or the triple. I do find it odd that anyone would be upset about something as insignificant as a nickname for a plane. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 737/guppy, 320/fifi, 747/whale, etc. It’s just a machine that pays $X/hr.