"tell me you know nothing about HI flying" / "Tactical Operations" ....here it is again from a HA pilots. They seem to think that the inter-island is somehow a special operation. WE DO THE EXACT SAME THING RIGHT NOW. We do it everyday up and down SE Alaska, short hops, worse weather, more mountains, lots more snow, lots of wind, lots of freight, etc. Its literally the exact same thing, and it is roped into the non-SE AK 737 route structure all over the place. We don't have a seperate fleet dedicated to that flying. Is there some reason why the exact same concept can't work out there? It is what Alaska knows and it works. Pretty soon a 737 will go SEA - HNL, and instead of turning around and coming back to the west coast, it will turn and do 3-4 (5? yikes) stops inter-island, and then turn it to come back to the west coast. As soon as that routes established, you can retire your next 717 thats due for heavy check, and so on and so on. It will not take long before the 717 community is in a shrinking fleet with shrinking bidding options. I hadn't thought about the new hire thats forced to commute out to HNL and sit jr reserve on the 717. Seems like that is another terrific reason to begin the process of winding down this fleet immediately.

This idea that somehow HA is going to get a cash infusion and it will be business as usual is simply not true. The HA route structure, business model, operational structure, is broken. Otherwise the stock wouldn't have been at $5. Lots of the reason for that is circumstantial....engines, Japanese tourists, covid, etc. But every other airline besides Spirit came flying out of the gates with a fresh tranch of government money and an economy that was dying to fly somewhere. HA didn't, thats because they have the misfortune of having a business model with very specific vulnerabilities. If you really think Angle Lake is going to simply leave this operation alone to subject themselves to the same threats and weaknesses that have taken down HA you are kidding yourselves. There is a lot of things to say about BM and ST. Being dumb isn't one of them.

The idea that this time is going to be different, I'm sure in some respects, but past precedent is a good predictor of future behavior. It will be interesting to watch, and there will be lots of pilot careers effected in the process. Deltas latest earnings report should be peaking everyones interest. I'm not saying the economic sky is falling or that the world is ending. But the stimmy money is burning off and a return to more normalized demand is inevitable. This is important, because it gives Angle Lake room to maneuver and justify unloading unprofitable assets into a new demand paradigm. Probably works out well for the company as a whole. Not so much for pilots.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mark...et/ar-BB1pKsJj

There is value in HA somewhere, maybe its just the obvious like 787 orders and island market share. Or maybe its more strategic like AS staving off being bought by another carrier. IDK, but certainly they bought it for a reason. What is not correct is that mergers (in general) are good for pilot careers. In this case AS pilot careers because our business is doing very well. I can not see any actual EVIDENCE that their was something flawed in our business model or that this merger was required for our survival. We are, at worst, in the top 1/3 of every metric a Wall Street investor looks at. Maybe there are external threats that we can't see but Ben can. Whats good for the company as a whole doesn't neccessarily mean its good for our careers.

The VA pilots post merger were very frustrated because their new center of gravity (Deathstar) became Seattle. It was a change of mindset that VA pilots I flew with constantly complained about. You can agree with the AS fixation on Seattle or not, but it is a fact. HA pilots will have to rearrange their mindset and realize they HNL is now a subsidary base like LAX, SFO, PDX, ANC. There will be lots of decisions that make no sense to them because Angle Lake looks at everything from a defend SEA first mindset.

Again, I don't want bad things for pilots. But now post VA merger we have seen how this goes down. I conceed it won't be exactly the same, but their is a playbook to integrating two operational structures, and it includes significant pain points for pilots. Talk to VA pilots if you can find them. Their experience is very notable. I listened to lots and lots of them on long red eyes. I found it very valuable information.