Originally Posted by
Sink r8
The division was opened up with the RJDC lawsuit. Across the divide remained a few bridges, fragile as they were, but these were burned to a crisp with the Lawson hiring letter.
There are many good people at Comair, and I will always judge an individual on their own merits, but I think that as a group, they've made it impossible for us to work with them in any constructive manner.
Your perspective ... from their perspective they were bought, their code was taken, their merger request denied, their attempts at negotiating scope to protect their jobs refused, their flying was dispersed. Clearly they saw the divide as having happened at the 2000 ALPA Board of Director's meeting.
When they organized and started to fight back, that is when
you noticed the division.
Not that I condoned the lawsuit or supported it, but I understood why they decided to fight back. From their perspective, they were happy at a rapidly growing, highly profitable, airline which was telling them DC9's were coming to fly under Comair code. Delta bought them, excluded them from "their" flying and trashed the place. While they certainly contributed to the battle damage, history has proven most of their worst fears were spot on accurate.
In Comair's salad days they had their own code, own tickets, or marketing. Certainly they were growing into markets Delta was leaving, but as far as they were concerned it was no different than Starbucks moving into where Dunkin Doughnuts had been. They developed a lot of their own routes.
My understanding was that part of the reason for buying Comair was to capture it's expansion and leverage it.
You and I know the history of other regional airlines who tried to make it on their own code. Atlantic Coast, MidWay, MidWest all died with pilots losing their jobs. Comair and ASA might have done the same, but that is historical conjecture. They know Delta bought them and blame Delta for their problems.