Originally Posted by
sailingfun
Wow, Did you even really read my post? I clearly stated I felt the E170/175 should be mainline. Here is a repost of parts since you did not read all of the first post.
""I believe its with the EMB170/175 and they should be at the mainline.""
""I think a excellent start would be for Delta to bring the E170/175 into the mainline. Some of that flying would be dropped in the transition as no longer cost viable but the net result I think would be a significant gain in mainline jobs. Not 1 for 1 as the jets come over but still a large gain.
This takes pressure off other airlines to allow outsourcing larger jets especially the CAL/UAL deal and a possible future contract at AMR if the NMB ever allows them back into mediation. ""
I guess I got hung up what I thought you meant WRT the "accuracy" of ALPA's (or anyone's for that matter) EF&A because by its very nature its analysis is short term and extremely static when it comes to something as operationally dynamic as outsourcing half your flights to a convoluted matrix of ACMI RFP low bidders.
The paragraph below was what I was mostly referring to:
The cost savings to outsource flying is always carefully monitored by DALPA. The ALPA economic analysis team is considered by even most airline managements to be the best around. This was especially true in the 1113 contract where the company had to put their case for outsourcing before a judge. The reality is that the company numbers and the EF&A numbers have always been very close. There have been differences but never large. The intangible in outsourcing is how much future revenue is lost due to poor performance of the contractor. The actual costs to outsource verses keeping the flying have rarely been in dispute.
The way I read that came across as you basically saying that ALPA/DALPA have accurately weighed the full impact of outsourcing. Not the "we make X per hour and they make X per hour and the difference is X per hour" of course they get that accurate. How could they not. But its the other variables that I think, upon further review, they get an epic fail for misjudging. Not only operationally as previously discussed, but
when the so called experts do their super secret drink your ovaltine ninja math and
then think they come up with a value for the "savings" of outsourcing, and armed with that "knowledge", they
then derive that it will be good for the pilot group and the company, and
then, almost immediately in some cases, we see the entire industry reverse course because their recent decision has pooped the bed. The company bleeds, hard. The pilots endured thousands upon thousands of furloughs and downgrades. The company bought multibillion dollar high and sold pennies on the dollar low. And its not that they got it wrong, because anyone can get something wrong. Its that they all got it so terribly wrong precisely after the "trust us, we're EF&A/MBA's" lecture of how us peons could never fathom the sheer genius of their industry prognostication in the first place
and then still proceed to keep doing the exact same thing today!
Yeah 76 is the new 50, but other than that its the same basic miscalculation and the company is in bed with common type 118 seat operators (one who also flies 150 seaters) and others with firm orders for semi-next gen 100 seaters. After the shellacking they just got on their less than stellar judgement call, the answer of the company seems to be that had they had those magical additional 26 seats everything would be alright, and the national union that prefers to barely if at all even address the issue while implying that it will take care of itself because the market forces of the smaller RJ's is playing out...at the same time they run huevos to the wall on the maximum number of larger RJ's.
Outsourcing the bottom half of the company was an epic fail, so the solution is 76 is better than 50, move along, nothing to see here?
And all of this, all of it, was at one time endorsed by the company bean counters and ALPA's EF&A. They both got it wrong, by the billions and billions of dollars, and so IMHO neither of them should be viewed with anywhere near the same level of credibility they both once commanded.
If airline managers can't manage their own airline, they have no business in the business. If pilot leadership can't realize that section one trumps every single issue, not because it is more important per say, but because it in essence
is every other issue, how can they be trusted to protect careers and "the profession" in the first place?
It isn't even about Monday morning quarterbacking, although I realize that's how it may come across. But it is about admitting where we screwed up, collectively as an industry, a company and a group because if they (management) won't, and/or if we won't admit that the MBA's and EF&A's were wrong about outsourcing, and they got it as wrong as they did with the 50 seater, what is going to happen with the current "armada" of larger outsourced jets and their up to 118 seat common types?
Management: use your "executive talent" to run a real airline, not a virtual one, or you by default don't know what you're doing.
Pilot leadership: with all due respect, its about the jobs, stupid. No matter how much the "bargaining credit" is, we are still burning the furniture to heat the house when we allow it.
So anyway sailing, my original rantishly sounding reply to you wasn't aimed at you but at the notion that EF&A and the beancounters get outsourcing wrong, don't want to admit it, and still say "trust me I'm a doctor" almost as if we didn't notice just how wrong they got it. That's all.