Originally Posted by Aquaticus

The tumi ta and American agreement was a stepping stone to the delta TA that I believe needed to happen to spur on negotiations across the industry. If you remember when the tumi came out everyone else was stalled and years away from a contract. UPS, Alaska, Spirit, and Delta all came to the table in short order after Tumis failure in such a spectacular fashion showed how out of touch management and our negotiating committee was. United needs to grow to service our debt and compete.

Two critical points right now are our current contract limits the speed at which we can train pilots and we don't have enough people willing to get abused on reserve as captains. We are structurally at the point where if they don't give us a contract superior to deltas we are done growing and will shrink to the flying that we can do with an upset pilot group.