AT was the younger group. How about this for career expectations, growth, etc…..

The SWA pilots that are one number above me and one below me had NOT EVEN GOTTEN HIRED AT SWA at the time I had upgraded at AirTran.

My “winning lottery ticket” saw me go from 35% left seat in our most junior domicile to 67% right seat in a mid-level domicile after they closed my AirTran domicile down. I’m grateful to have a long drive to work as opposed to a short flight to work but am simply stating that to show the serious F-job that was the “merger” seniority wise. Loss of 32% relative seniority for me & almost four years date of hire.

Don’t even bother trying to convince them that in 2010 AirTran was anything but about to fold, because I’ve found that to be as successful as convincing them that going from AirTran Cptn to SWA FO was indeed actually a pay cut.

At the date of merger announcement (DOM), they had ZERO airplanes on order. That was part of the reason for the really long upgrade. We had 50 more 737s coming which for a lot smaller airline was a large percentage of growth. Along that line, you’re welcome for the -800s. That was our production slots that we had the option to switch to -800s that got converted over to SWA production slots. Again, SWA has ZERO orders from Boeing at the time of DOM. How does that effect career expectations?

Just to be fair, long term I will acknowledge the positives from my “winning lottery ticket”. Namely a long drive to work with no airplanes involved with my commute (although that same domicile was next on the list to open for AirTran).

Second, *probably* greater career earnings overall with the caveat that if AirTran was still around we’d probably be on par with JBA, NK, & F9 in pay and contract. That begs the question…..would you rather be a senior captain at those carriers or a junior one at SWA. Only earlier this year did I recover my overall system seniority to what it was. It only took 12 years.

Some of you really need to educate yourselves on what factors past arbitrators have used to rule on “fair & equitable” in SLI’s. I’ll give you a hint: it almost always involved “career expectations”, no bump/no flush (no one lost their captaincy or got bumped off equipment types), and fences especially if one side was bringing widebodies to the party.

What it didn’t involve was stapling (as 60% of our FOs got to experience), the “capturing” of all captain seats (gotta love that SWAPA merger committee coined term), especially when the acquiring carrier had ZERO growth expected while the acquired carrier was bringing aircraft orders with it (the 88 B717s got leased to DLA well AFTER the merger was under way).

So the “snap shot” on the date of merger announcement that is so typically used by arbitrators was certainly not what so many of you SWA Koolies have created in your head. Fortunately for you, Gary’s not so veiled threat was successful in convincing the majority of us to vote YES (Not me obviously).

I was just talking to a senior Delta widebody captain. His exact words were, “God you guys got screwed”. There’s a reason our peers at other airlines coined the term “Getting AirTraned”. Think about it…..