Originally Posted by
KC10 FATboy
I'm a new dog in this fight, a new hire. I haven't yet lived through a furlough, nor have I seen half of my pay and all of my retirement stolen.
What concerns me is if we go forward with restoring the record setting pay, does that leave us exposed to the major LCCs (SWA, jetBlue, AirTran)? And could they essentially put us back into bankruptcy within a year?
We need SWA and the other LCCs to also achieve record setting contracts. Otherwise, they will once again eat up market share and we will continue to see DAL shrink domestically. If that continues, we risk losing the entire airline because of no domestic feed to international (PanAm).
Additionally, we need the other legacies to push forward with major advances in contracts. I think if we are the first to move, we lose the farm. If we were successful and restored the pay, what would the average increase in the price of a ticket come to? Would our passengers be willing to pay it? Additionally, I would imagine furloughs as a result. And as a new hire, I would accept that assuming we didn't bankrupt the company. It just sickens me that companies like SWA who chipped away at everyone else, is now the industry leader in pay, yet, they are a far cry of what the industry standard used to be.
I know there's a lot that I need to learn here, and I'm welcome to be ridiculed for my young and ignorant thoughts.
Good points, but rememeber that the game and how DAL plays it has changed since 2001.
We are in a totally different position Globally then we were in 2001. We are a different company with a different focus, different core business principles etc. We do not fly 10,000 seats a day to Mikey World. We do not fly 767's to BDL every other hr. We have moved the assets around, and when the economy recovers we will see a major shift in the bottom line.
I am sure as the day is long that the union will do an effective and complete Cost Analysis of their proposal prior to throwing it across the table. We will know what the costs are and how each of them will effect the bottom lime and our ability to compete in the domestic and international arena. Thinking otherwise is short sighted. This group is smart, and in my opinion has learned from all of the mistakes on both sides of the table.
SWA is doing no better or worse than it was in 2001. They have gotten some moderate gains, but overall they have stayed where the rest of us have retreated. I would venture to bet that if none of the other majors gets wages on par with them, they will have to retreat. SWA has the cushion to play this out for a few years.
AMR, and CAL are well in to their talks. Both are our for blood and I am guessing will be decided long before we enter. They are working off of our JPWA. UAUA's pilots are madder than a hornet and have given so much to an inept management team that I do not see them giving the farm to keep them afloat.
The point of this is we really are the last ones up. We will have a fairly good perspective of how things are going forward come 2012. This industry's face will be totally different by then to. It appears we are on the cusp of some real consolidation beyond our own. The fact that all airlines have deeply cut capacity will allow pricing power when demand returns. The "if" to that, is if they all do not get drunk with adding capacity back in. I feel our team will be constrained in that endeavor. I also think that many others will be too. No one wants to get burnt by that fire again. That is where the real chance at sustained profitability comes from.
The credit markets are not drunk on aviation like they have been in the past. These guys are very concerned about the negative returns on investing in our industry. Going forward, I do not see these guys giving money to the start up de jour. The will want to help the players left so that the can reap significant returns on their investments.