Originally Posted by
OnTheMeridian
This wasn't the result of any "ordinary" recession. The economic collapse in 2008 was massive. We hadn't seen anything even close to it since the great depression. But that wasn't the only factor. The whole Bernie Madoff thing happened at the same time. We lost many aircraft worth of clients because of him.
But probably the biggest factor leading up to the furloughs was Kenny Dichter. Netjets purchased dozens of aircraft just to service the Marquis crowd. When Dichter left us holding the bag on that one we ended up with dozens of unencumbered aircraft.
Combine all that and yeah, Netjets furloughed. It didn't help that RTS had committed to purchasing a lot of Hawker 400XP's which we had no clients for.
As was said, Netjets is structured very differently now.. I certainly wouldn't use the word "never" in regards to future furloughs. Who can predict just how bad things can get from time to time? Life never ceases to surprise me. But when it comes to recessions that are more typical to the economic cycle I'd say there's very little for our pilots to worry about.
To add to the story...when Dave Solol came in to help patch the sucking chest wound he wanted to dispose of all small cabin planes (Encores, Excels, 400s) and release the pilots. This would have been a huge help. Due to having a pilot union and seniority list many senior pilots kept their job and of course the casualities were from the bottom up. One pilot was hired in the 1980's and was number seven on the overall list. He would have lost his job if no union and seniority list.
Sokol had no clue how an aviation company list operates and thought he'd strong arm the pilot group as he did non-pilot employees.
Sokol's reign of terror ended in August, 2009.