Arbitration isn't talking. It's rolling the dice and putting everyone's interests in the hands of an incompetent third party. That may pass for leadership at NWA, but it doesn't at DAL. Just look at the "New U.S. Airways" for an example of the efficacy of arbitration.

That is a good question for your reps.

DAL pilots would be getting more because our contract won't let management execute Plan B without our consent. Steenland came back to Delta asking to screw all the pilots, and it was discovered that it wasn't possible due to our scope clause. Relaxing that has a price, and it is about to be paid, if the reports are to be believed. We all wanted Plan A, but your negotiating committee rejected it. I suggest you ask them why they did that to you, but don't expect us to turn down what is probably the only carrot to come out of this inevitable deal because your guys were too recalcitrant to accept a fair SLI in addition to all the improvements you were to get above and beyond what was and is being offered to the Delta pilots. The alternative is Plan C, where management goes ahead with a traditional merger, we all get nothing, and the SLI is an arbitrated integration with completely unpredictable results. If that's what you want, you can probably still get it, but we choose to use the leverage that was paid for by other sacrifices.

Again, I think that you, the other NWA guys on here, and the vast majority of Northwest's rank-and-file pilots are reasonable people who could've come to an agreement. Unfortunately, by the reports we're getting, the vast armada of disparate interests who showed up to negotiate the SLI from the NWA side were too concerned about getting a windfall for those at the top of the Red & Green Book lists to worry about anyone else's interests, including yours. This has all been kept from you by your MEC, who would like you to believe that it was the "unreasonable Delta pilots" who were trying to subjugate your seniority and not their personal greed that hurt the entire pilot group at both airlines.

Believe it if it makes you feel better, but know that you're blaming the wrong people. If you're a Blue Book guy, the Delta MEC has been doing, and is continuing to do, more to protect your interests than anyone at NWA. Without their unique relationship with our management, there would never have been "pilot goodies" on the table to begin with, and we all would've woken up to news of this in the WSJ one day.