It was Aloha Airlines.... in busness for 61 years from July 26, 1946 until March 31, 2008 and it was one of the oldest ALPA carriers at the end.

Think the ALPA bank was interesting? How's this? The contracts and concessions were negotiated by NC, then they were presented to the membership via a union meeting, but would only get voted on by the 3 MEC members. If it passed those 3 guys, it became the contract. You can howl all you want, but membership ratification was not a thing there. The argument? "They signed disclosure agreements, so they knew what was good and what was affordable whereas you as an individual member did not, and you could not make an intelligent vote." And that was good with ALPA National too.

Having said that, it was indeed a career place in part because we had the A-plan pension (frozen and dumped on PBGC in 2004 - replaced by another NEC plan/C-plan and your contribution was eventually variable based on your age and your actual vs. potential loss of A-plan), 7% B-plan, 401k, the hourly rate was industry standard, and at some point it was industry-leading 737 pay. The downside was you were held to 80 hours of pay if you were a line holder. 71 if you were on reserve, so essentially you were salaried. As a young pup back then, never really paid much attention to trivial things like LTD, STD, but apparently that was industry leading... Towards the end, we also had things like 16 day reserve where if you as a pilot wanted to bunch up your days off, you could so you could have 14 off in the row... then the following month you could do the reverse and end up with essentially a month off without so much as burning a single day of vacation or sick leave. As common with many ALPA carriers, reserves didn't fly very much, so a number of people with other interests would run their business and be on permanent reserve. But if you wanted to make any extra money beyond your min guarantee, wrong airline - but feel free to start a business and make extra money that way. That's what I appreciate about Southwest - I can start and run a side business if that's my interest. Or I can play the game here, and virtually double my guaranteed pay at times should I choose to flog myself... but the choice is mine.

Having choices in life is a great thing. That's why I'm fully onboard with making apples to apples comparison with OAL's based on min guarantee; but also hope we don't screw ourselves and start throwing limits around that eventually only hose us as pilot group. That's part of the reason why I support the co-terminals concept - between commuters who will have more options to commute to work and start at a co-terminal, to locals who will choose to fly out of co-terminals over the base for whatever reason, and all this being limited to 20% of the lines or at absolute most, 1 in 5 bid pilots could ever hold co-terminal flying. I don't see this going junior at all. Another example I like that the union released was for people who choose to work over vacation to be able to now pick up from TTGA as opposed to just bid POT/HOT. Again, choices in life...

While there should always be guard rails, I don't like going down the path of artificially limiting our choices.