If you say it 3 times in the mirror it might come true.

 

Yeah it might lol

 

Ha! I can hear his mom right now, asking him through the bathroom door, if he's o.k. and why does he keeps yelling "Alaska!"...

 

I’m not kid but whatever.

 

you not kid? You not smart, either...

 

Ok what’s your point.

 

Bless your heart WNeast. You have a good night. Don't stand in front of that mirror too late tonight, ok.

 

I do not see the correlation between firing a VP ahead of a merger announcement. Perhaps you could provide a little color here...

 

Come on, Zap. You’re smarter and have far too much industry experience to believe this. First of all, upgrade is based on your relative seniority and not the number of pilots above you. It’s a percentage.

Second, you know darn well how senior SWA FOs (like yourself) faired during the last “marriage”, but I’ll just refresh the memories of those reading:

SWA was a stagnant airline with zero orders on the books in 2010. They bought another airline roughly a third of their size that had new B737s inbound.

SWAPA (with the help of SWA) was able to “capture” 🙄 the captain seats of transitioning pilots and thus many senior SWA FOs got an upgrade much sooner as their upgrade at the time was based on retirements and not fleet growth as again, SWA had no orders on the books.

I’m not advocating that Alaska pilots get treated the same way as the last red-headed stepchildren but to suggest that past mergers (Morris Air being another great example…..staple with pay protection) haven’t been a boost to SWA pilots’ relative seniority and “capture” of captain’s seats would be inaccurate.

In the most recent example, it was all of the “acquired” captain’s seats with an average gain of 8% relative seniority for SWAPA pilots and average loss of 22% for the scum that were acquired.

 

My assumption, Whack, is that lessons were learned by union negotiators and industry watchers, and the next integration would correct the errors. The scales would shift so that no group is so decisively benefitted at the expense of another (Which can only negatively effect me, so ... since all politics are local, I'm against.) Nobody is going to ask you or I, but I think a merger can only hurt FOs right now.