Carl Spackler

Boy that is one heck of a hypothetical. The only way that could happen is if an arbitrator decided DOH by December. That of course will not happen. But if it did, I think that would be unfair to Delta pilots. I hear our guys say that the senior Delta guys are senior only because of the mass exodus. But that mass exodus resulted in the huge under funding and ultimate termination of the pension plan. Senior Delta pilots today paid for their seniority with the loss of pension. I don't want to undercut that as I think a DOH seniority list would do. If we agreed to the new combined contract, that would be terrific - but I fail to see how the current strategy of a one-sided LOA makes that more likely to happen. That action has driven a wedge between us that was not there before the LOA.

I'm one of those red book pilots who holds "premium" flying. I hear the green book side refer to us as "out of seniority" just as you have. Our pre-merger seniority list was horribly lopsided because Republic hired 1200 pilots during a ten year period when Northwest hired none. DOH in our case was going to produce a hugely lopsided SLI. The arbitrator went straight DOH anyway. To mitigate the DOH imbalance he protected NWA wide bodies that were on the property at the time for 20 years, and mandated shared growth 1 for 1. He further protected Republic DC-9's for 20 years and mandated shared growth 1 for 1. He stated that the only way he could award DOH was with these restrictions to protect both pilots pre-merger seats. DOH without the long restrictions would have produced a massive windfall which ALPA merger policy prohibits.

So now that you know the background, you can see that my "out of seniority" seniority number was given on the proviso of seat protections for both sides. There is no out of seniority flying in any seat.

Carl