Originally Posted by sailingfun

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.