This. Delta is the best run airline in the country right now. Sure everything is cyclic, but even if they stopped trying, their momentum will carry them through the next decade. I did just walk through the terminal and Delta has the usual appeal it's developed everywhere.
Clean, organized and happy looking gates and full flights.

Delta would happily shed gates to make the DOJ happy. Afterall, C concourse is rats nest, with all the cramming of AG, and Delta learned to make things tidy. Plus American and United operate a fair few flights out of SEA, so I wouldn't worry about anti-trust.

I'm an outsider but I like AS and think they have a good product and loyal customers. Your employees are great too, but I also think they are being run likes it 1975.

 

Son - I don’t even know where to start or what to say. You are a lost cause. Name calling just makes you look silly. Nothing I have said should make you think that I don’t care about anyone junior to me or that I don’t care about our profession . I have spent years volunteering in ALPA. How many years of your time have you given to ALPA?
You are one of those tuff guys who likes to thump your chest and talk about how bad stuff is and how it’s always the fault of some senior guy or some weak MEC. Your kind never has an actual solution or even a logical rational thought. Nor will you step up, volunteer and work for the betterment of the contract. Just a lot of hot air.
You seem to be hung up on the idea that a strike will cure all that ails you. You see it as some holy grail that will achieve total victory and the best contract, not to mention a super cool battle star on your ALPA pin!
When seasoned pilots explain to you the legitimate, logical, and real reasons on why a strike can not happen at Alaska Airlines, you default to unprofessional silliness.
I don’t care if you believe me. I don’t care if you think poorly of me because I’m senior to you. I don’t care if you think your big balls leading the charge on a strike is all that is needed to improve our contact. I do know that I can’t count on you because you have proven yourself to be rather irrational. I hope that you will mature over the course of your career and become someone that can be counted on.
I use to be a hot head in my youth as well. Thankfully I started to listen and learn. I volunteered, I got engaged, I helped make a difference.
What are you going to do? Unfortunately, you will probably just swear some more, throw out a few more insults, and try to convince yourself that somehow guys like me are the problem.
Meanwhile, the truth remains. There will never be a strike allowed at Alaska Airlines as long as we have the responsibility of providing service in the great state of Alaska.

 

Accepting that as fact guarantees you will NEVER have a decent contract. I honestly think your years of volunteering for the union would have been better spend fishing, because with that attitude you end up with a contract that allows for 8 calendar days off minimum on reserve.

 

I know much what you are saying is a rebuke to ASPilot, and for that I will cut you some slack.

However, just as the group-splitters (damn senior guys! Etc.) are damaging to the whole process, the furtherance of the idea that we are in a hopeless situation with the RLA is just as damaging.

“We will never be released to self-help because of...(fill in your reason) ” if you actually read the law and the accompanying court cases, you will see that the RLA’s power in this regard is not limitless. First off, if we did get to a PEB then it is only 30 days, at which point we could resort to self-help.

Getting an impasse declared is also a difficult hurdle I will grant you but still not a limitless one. It’s not a bright line but it is thought to be somewhere around the 3 year mark that you could reasonably expect to go into a federal court and have an impasse declared for you by the court since there is a good chance that a court would find the RLA to not be acting in compliance with the law once we are talking about 3+ year time frames.

So no it is not impossible. If it were as impossible as you say then the logical thing to do would be to vote ALPA out and just keep the 2% a year since that means we have zero leverage.

The part about a strike that a lot of people are missing though, is that it is not the Strike itself that gets the results, it is the WILLINGNESS to strike that does.

Like nuclear missiles. If your enemies believe for a second that you would not be willing to use them when provoked...you would be toast - literally.

My other point is that Joe Flying-Public does not know the intricucies of the RLA, all they might know is that there is labor trouble at Alaska, better buy a ticket on Delta to prevent our vacation being ruined next summer. This fact will get you to a deal sooner if handled properly then would otherwise happen.

Anyway, that is why I actively advocate that strike preparations begin now. We need large piles of cash in reserves as a union, pilots in financial situations that are on board and able to walk off the job for three months in 2022 (2020+2-3 years) without breaking a sweat.

Mutually Assured Destruction.

Nobody wants to, but we have to be willing to.

 

The flaw in your reasoning is that we've had strike votes in the past with 95% voting for a strike.

How much good has it done?

 

I'm absolutely baffled by Alaska pilots' love for looking to the past to predict the future. "Don't forget how bad it was" is something that AS management loves to repeat, and it has worked brilliantly.

The landscape in the airline industry in the last 20, even the last 10, years has changed dramatically. Even your own airline has changed dramatically. So all of these truths that you think are irrevocable are anything but.

 

Just as it amazes me that pilots with ZERO experience dealing with AS management think they're going to come in and change Angle Lake's playbook.

Good luck with that.

I do hope you're successful, though. Just remember...A leopard can't change his spots.

 

Alaska as a state is half the economic engine it was 15 years ago. Alaska the airline is not even close to the importance that it was 15 years ago. Just a convenient excuse for the paint-job-pride guys and gals to hide behind. Grateful that we just gained 1000 pilots that have no paint-job-pride.
Alaska the airline is a shell of half truths, dirty deals and false promises. The sooner we all stop caring about crap like brand and image the better off we are. A former CEO told us, “I won’t give you anything that you dont make me give you”. His attitude still forms the core values of this airline. High time we take that guys advice.

 

^^^^^^
This!!!
That is generally the reality of corporate America..

 

Which CEO would that be? Would it be someone who sounds like this song?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=imfUAXcdkH8