(I'm an XJ pilot) The year leading up to July 1, some Mesaba pilots were working more cancelled 9E flights than actual XJ flights. 9E was cancelling a lot of flights for crews. They would even swap multiple flights over to the same broken plane so as to make it look like a maintainence cancellation. (Apparently this is less embarrasing than stranding pax because they simply wouldn't or couldn't staff their airline.) Well anyway these cancellations by 9E were a big problem for Delta. If 9E had not have employed XJ furloughees, and if the aquisition had not happened, what do you think would have happened? One possibility would be an asset transfer from the carrier that could not operate those assets to a carrier that could. The point is that it did not hurt 9E pilots to have XJ furloughees come in house to help staff the logistical disaster that was 9E. It would have been far worse to resolve cancellations by transferring flying away from 9E. One wonders: why didn't 9E simply hire enough people all those years? In any event, those XJ furloughees are not displacing senior 9E pilots and are not hurting 9E in general. In fact, their presense is a mutually beneficial event.