Heyas,

It's actually fairly easy. The "fences" that were up after the NWA and Republic mergers weren't fences, but rather quotas.

Read line 5 of the award NW/DL SLI award:

5. Should the merged company take delivery of any aircraft which is/are a replacement of any aircraft covered by Paragraph 4., the captain positions and, as applicable, the first officer positions on each such replacement aircraft will be allocated in accordance with the Paragraph 4. restrictions on the type it is replacing.

Allocations are the same as quotas. You take a snapshot of the staffing of the 744, and you apply that as "red" staffing on any 777 category. As the SLI only applies to position staffing/displacement, once people are in the seats, it's treated as one big category with people bidding their seniority (same as if there are insufficient bidders).

We had red and green guys flying the same equipment together, even replacement equipment, for years and years in accordance with the NW/REP merger SLI using this process.

This is a molehill, not a mountain. Does it cause a little bit of administrative fiddling during awards/displacements? Yup. But that's about it.

They didn't want the 777s because they didn't want them. The SLI had nothing to do with it.

Nu