Key words, on time.

The planes and various employee contracts were paid for in pre-pandemic dollars while forward revenue will come in the form of a devalued currency and significant inflation. Profit sharing will be solid; however, we should be focusing on buying power. Contract 2022/23 needs to solve for buying power, a huge hit to QOL on the domestic side and for its potential duration.

My take aways:

We never had C19, we need to keep that in focus.

We are now discussing C23 and inflation has changed significantly since then.

At the conclusion of C23, the company will not close the next contract on time.

Abandoning retro pay just entices the company to sign shorter contracts that they have no intention of renegotiating. This effectively cuts the pay raise in half.

Our contract pays in fixed dollars, there will be significant erosion of those dollars going forward.

C23 with retro, may possibly represent nearly a decade or a half to one third of most pilot's careers.

Additional thoughts:

C16 was sold as a huge pay increase, in a vacuum it was. However, the change to the assignment of open time allowed for the optimizer and I think we can all agree the company extracted at least 5% productivity from that nugget alone. C16 was extended to C23, again cutting those gains in half. C16, at 38%, offered only 5% per year raises when duration is taken into account. That 5% a year raise doesn't take into account 12+ year pilots bypassing NB-A for WB-B, another 18% pay cut, to avoid the optimizer and enjoy the QOL they once had. Even if C23 offered a 40% raise, it would represent raises from 2019 to potentially 2030, 4% a year.