The problem with hindsight is its 20/20...but it doesn't acknowledge the situation *at the time*, only what the situation looks like well after the fact.

Every argument that "we'd have been negotiating a contract during our best leverage in history" is equally countered by "we'd be in the same basic situation as FDX" due in part to COVID.

Negotiations wouldn't have started in Sept 2020 due to everybody (Company and IPA) scrambling putting out fires all over the world, to include crewmembers locked up in Asia. There were no face-to-face meetings occuring in ANY airline contract negotiation during this time. It is entirely likely negotiations would not have started until late spring/early summer 2021, like they did for FDX, with joint application for NMB mediation delayed accordingly and no guarantee the NMB would have assigned us a mediator. While we all hope we'd have had a TA by summer 2025 had we started negotiating in summer 2021, there is no guarantee the timing of an agreement would have been advantagous to us. Our COVID volume started dropping in late 2022 and fell off a cliff in 2023 which led us to VTP in fall 2023 - anybody think we'd get industry leading after putting 200 people out the door early? POOF there goes the COVID leverage. Postal being announced in April 2024 admittedly changed the situation, but nobody can know how balls would have bounced on that or any other issue.

That whole time, our top pay rate would be $337.65 putting us in a MASSIVE hole compared to the Big 3's 2023 contracts, and we'd be nearing the end of the 2016 FDA runway.

The EB came to us twice and said "we think this is a good thing for these reasons", and 98% then 90% of the group agreed. While 10 year contract cycles (2006-2016, 2016-202x?) certainly limit opportunities to change language, my prognostication is we are in much better shape with the extensions than we'd have been without them. Thing is, that's just like my opinion man, and there's no way to know with certainty one way or another. We can AAR and second guess until we're blue in the face, but it won't change the decision made in the moment with the information that was available.

We started negotiations a few months early, we're negotiating twice a month before the 11Sept25 NMB joint application, Atlanta has been involved in our negotiations, and there's been more progress thus far than previous IPA negotiations. We'll see how quickly all that ultimately bears fruit, then we'll each have a say in accepting or rejecting whatever agreement is reached. We're not gonna get everything that everybody wants, but I personally think we're gonna move the ball down the field in a substantive manner from where we've been.