ERJ Driver

[rant=12]

Reeves, I have been away on a crazy trip for a couple of days so I missed your response here. I am always happy to speak my mind. No offense taken!

So, my mindset? Think:
1) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ["As your Attorney I advise you to ______"; "Did you see what God just did to us man?" "Can't stop here! This is bat country."]
mixed in with the last 30 min of
2) 2001 [... insanity]
and
3) Walter Sobchak from the Big Lebowski ["I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand dude. ACROSS THIS LINE YOU DO NOT... oh and by the way dude, a marmet in city limits, that isn't legal either." "What, are you Ranger Rick now?"]

Mindset. I am so con-sarn-it fang-a-rangit STRESSED OUT it's driving me up the wall [or out of the walls as Hudson would have it, from Aliens]. But, this is everyone at MAG right now. We are beleaguered on all sides. Other pilots hate us (for all the wrong reasons too), MGT rains holy heck on our parade [but when THEIR contracts get violated, well this is just unacceptable! They're going straight to court, no binding arbitration for them!]. Delta is out for us. Aloha and Hawaiian are out for us. Our leaders are outright prevaricators, and it is all coming to a head right now. Contract rights mean nothing for the pilot group any longer. You just can't understand it man, I am sorry. The only way to really explain it to you is to turn the clock back 5-6 years and have you come work here. You will see AMAZING things: things like crew tracking messing with your reported block times to make you legal to fly; junior assignments up the ying-yang; canceled vacations... CANCELED YO, as in bye bye, to bad so sad; attrition like you would not believe; management pilots trying to make you do stuff that is just plain crazy (like fly through 20 hours of duty time on so-called "part-91" repositions); oh man, I could go on and on and on... What do you really want from me? Mind set? How do I even go there. Think: Animal Farm. 1984. Metamorphosis. Jeckyl and Hyde. Brave New World. And don't even let me get started on stuff we have no control over like Bush's TSA. Oh lordy. Nothing quite like getting stripped down like a GD criminal yo and then 5 min later have access to a crash ax, fire extinguisher and operational control over the aircraft. Wow. Yea, that little metal detector really did a great job "protecting us".

Mindset. Let me see. This country is going crazy. We are living in a cuckoo clock. It's TOTALLY nuts. Ya know, he has his ax to grind, but that Michael Moor dude has some valid critiques. I don't agree with everything he says, but dang. He has some stingers in there.

Mindset? We are all little cogs in a machine that is running at full tilt, it's in the red and important pieces are starting to melt down. Like Vince Vega once said, "I got a threshold, Jules. I got a threshold for the abuse that I will take. Now, right now, I'm a f.in' race car, right, and you got me the red. And I'm just sayin', I'm just sayin' that it's f.in' dangerous to have a race car in the f.in' red. That's all."

So, I'm off to pound down a Mcdonald's burger and puke it back up in the lav. I can only imagine what its like to be a pilot on the street from Aloha, ATA or whomever... Skybus. I guess the ATA guys are going to SouthWest... so I guess I ain't too sad for them. But a friend of a friend said he showed up at the gate for his fancy Skybus job and there was nobody there. "What's up?" "Oh, y'all closed doors." "Ok, can I jumpseat home?" "No, your badge is no longer valid."

So, to sum up my mindset, I would like to provide you with this little bit of my reality:

I'm saving up for the plane ticket home I will have to buy on the day our doors close.


Good luck with that.


[/rant]