[quote=Sink r8;75698





What happened to you sucks. No doubt about it. But it [I]happened[/I] already. And the union tried to compensate with the Note money. The attempt at clean-up has been made. Now, we have two choices: suck it up, and accept our fate, or make more attempts, each uglier than the other, and each, as Scambo said, with a clear potential to cost us, and cost us dearly.

My focus is on our future, not the past.


I would point out that retirement is the future for all pilots. A matrix has been used before at Delta. It was put into place to try and give every pilot the same retirement benefit. This was to insure a junior pilot got the same retirement as a senior pilot with the frozen DB plan. When the frozen DB plan was terminated many dead zone pilots were getting little or nothing in DC funding. They were told by the union that if the DB plan terminated then there would be a sort of reverse matrix to compensate for the years of low or zero funding. That matrix never came about however we did get the note.
The intitial distribution method on the note was to compensate pilots for the lost DB plan. They put together a set of assumptions on time value and investment performance over time to see where each pilot would end up retirement wise. They then ran the numbers based on those assumptions.
The result was really ugly for the junior pilots with the bottom half of the seniority list essentially getting nothing from the note. They decided despite the fact that the numbers supported this it was politically unacceptable. They then decided to plus each pilot up to 205,000 dollars FAE in the old frozen plan and rerun the numbers. Even with the plus up it was still ugly for the bottom half of the list. So they added yet another feature which was a years of service minimum. This produced the final method to distribute the money. It was a method that now had little to do with the original goal of providing each pilot a roughly equal retirement.

A similiar thing happened over at UAL. ALPA just settled a lawsuit over that at UAL for 44 million. There are rumors that a lawsuit will be filed against DALPA by the years end. A settlement of that lawsuit may require a matrix or cash payout. DALPA started with the attempt to clean things up with the note as you state but in the end abandoned that concept. There is still cleanup left to be done.