Originally Posted by
FlyingSlowly
It's not a weird way to look at it, rather it's called contingency planning... Management does it all the time. Not suggesting that such will occur with any decent probability, just keeping the COVID-era parking in mind. "Shrinking to profitability" is a completely different concept from temporarily parking panes rather than flying empty planes and losing even more money. COVID showed that paying crews to not fly was better financially than paying them to fly empty planes.
To keep up with management, we have to learn how they think so we don't get outmaneuvered with another Tumi (or something similar)
Parking planes is about being ready to reactivate when the demand returns, not about "shrinking to profitability" by permanently giving up LAX gates, JFK slots, etc...
Ok but remember “paying pilots not to work” was only financially viable because:
- The feds were covering billions in losses to the airlines
- We had agreed to take pay cuts in the event that support ran dry
If this tariff war tanks the economy, what do you think the odds are the administration is going to foot the bill? And given Trump has dissolved dozens of labor contracts this week alone, I’m less confident than ever in our contractual protections. It’s not out of the question that airline CEOs would go to the administration & complain that our “bloated labor contracts” are making it hard for them to provide “essential transportation”. An executive order would be so much easier than upholding the contract or working with the union on an agreeable path forward.
Again, I’m not saying any of this is a sure thing, it’s just a bad confluence of events when a weak economy hits in an aggressively pro-management landscape.