Did you look at how that's all broken down? A small percentage involves us. It looked to me like we're 15-20% of $700 million over the next few years. The new sort facilities and fuel savings were about 2/3rds of it with maintenance savings in there... Did you hear we're getting rid of the MDs... Oh yeah... That's your point and that'll save both fuel and maintenance.

They are downsizing things by 200 jobs. Let's assume the average pilot costs them $300k a year counting everything. That's $60 million a year just right there and when you space that out over several years it almost exactly adds up to that percentage of $700 million. Oh yeah... They probably aren't going to make it that long without a new contract, so if we were to assume a 20% pay increase that'd probably be an extra $10-20 million per year they save on those 200 jobs cut... Plus signing bonuses.

Also, in this bid they stuffed an extra 200 pilots into the right seat of the 757 which saves millions more by paying these pilots who won't be flying much narrow body instead of widebody pay. This sucks, but they are being transparent about what they're doing there and it's money that's absolutely included in that crew number that you see on the slideshow presented above. If those pilots leave then they'll be saving maybe $250k a year counting everything and who knows if they included those numbers in there as well.

Get scared all you want. You can live in fear of this if it makes you feel better. It looks like something they're choosing to do now so that when things pick back up we can penetrate new markets with 767s and 777s instead of MD11s, 757s and Airbuses that are older than most of our pilots.