The current A plan has cost the company ZERO for the last 4 years. They've put ZERO contributions into the Big Pool. (I cannot remember what it's called) But the pot of money that has the pilots, the managers, the old employee retirement money, etc. How much of that fund is the pilots? No one seems to actually know or be willing to share. But if the last 4 years have cost the company ZERO, how do you know increasing the annuity payout will even cost them anything? Just for giggles I searched some Schwab annuity pricing. If I do a $15k monthly payout at 60 then a $15k payout at 65 is about $500k less. A $11k monthly payout at 60 roughly costs the same as a 15k payout at 65. Since the fund is funded to IRS mandates for age 60 when our retirement triggers, it seems to my quick math that it costs the company ZERO to raise the A plan to 180k if every pilot went to 65. I'm not sure it would take too much negotiating capital to get a cost zero improvement.

Since we "know" that the company fund makes at least 6.5% per year in ROI because that is the amount our NC said we would make in the company run CBP. Then it's not too hard to project forward how much the big fund will allow to provided increases for the A plan going forward. Now we have no real idea what the company numbers are since ALPA won't tell us, or they don't know. But all the union saying the company cannot afford to increase the A plan really does not make sense at least to my simple math. It's not costing them anything now.