Waves,

Ill take a stab at the pay thingie. It will be overly simplistic, but I'm overly simplistic.

Keenster is a whale guy so his hours are, in general, the same from month to month (low but somewhat consistent) where yours and mine are probably a lot alike.

The two premerger airlines manned differently, which makes comparisons difficult. NWA manned by block hour vs Delta manned by jet. If I knew any more than that I've forgotten......great memory, it's just real short.

Both airlines carried a minimum number of guys to cover basically winter then got used to guys flying overtime in the summer. You did it with GS and rolling thunder (I still don't know what that is), we did it with a flex up months. It's like ALV but different.....shoot I don't even remember what it was called.

But, for example, in the winter I would normally fly 73 to 75 hours. In the summer I'd fly 85 and I can remember flying 88 after bankruptcy (scheduled not picked up, modified or BOBed). In fact, even up to Bid period 5 for us 757 guys, the Asia trips were 14 day 83-85 hour trips.

So as you can see, the arbitrators were wrong. I flew straight time for 7 or 8 hours a month and the rest would be built so most guys were flying 1.5 over 80.

Just a different way of skinning the cat. Oh, and we also had your version of the green slip. Super premium dog **** trips that were unsellable that went for 2x......never did one. In fact I refused to commute to high time, too much like tempting fate. Plus, I thought picking up high time with guys on furlough was immoral.

Dont know if that helps

Ferd