A large airline is a complex business with a lot of moving parts. How do they make up for oil going up $10, $20, $50 a barrel? How do they make up for starting up airlines with green sperm painted all over the aircraft and then deciding to scrap the whole thing? What about Breezeway Boarding trip rugs? How much did those cost? How much does it cost to rebrand/logo the entire airline? How much does it cost to buy regional airlines for billions of dollars and then sell them for a fraction of what was paid? How much do weather systems impacting our hubs cost each year? How do they make up for a particularly bad luck year with weather impacting multiple hubs multiple times?

The point is that there are frequently massive swings in cost to an airline. Ticket pricing is an extremely complex thing that also has wild swings. Are you telling me there's not an opportunity anywhere in there to reorder and/or allocate things so that pilots could be compensated in line with the way we were compensated for decades? Is $5 bucks a ticket... whether it's recouped through increased ticket prices, reductions in costs in other areas, or a combination of many different things... really that significant? What kinds of synergies and efficiencies does a company gain by treating its employees like a valuable asset instead of strictly a cost item? (Hint: Many successful business experts understand this concept.)

My experience has been that, when a company identifies something that is a priority to them, they find a way to make it happen. I guess as long as DALPA continues to downplay the importance of it and make it sound like we're just fine, management will continue to keep it off their list of priorities.