Originally Posted by MinRest

Which is ironic, seeing as AS is the airline that put out a company wide email banning us from hugging each other in the terminal as it was a holdover from the VX days.

Originally Posted by TheDuster

I’m just happy you guys stopped feeding WNEast… that kid has some issues.

Originally Posted by ShyGuy

The only reason these merger rumors started is because Frontier announced a merger with Spirit, then jetBlue announced their interest in Spirit, and Alaska getting merged this year was a guaranteed outcome, because....?

Originally Posted by ShyGuy

The only reason these merger rumors started is because Frontier announced a merger with Spirit, then jetBlue announced their interest in Spirit, and Alaska getting merged this year was a guaranteed outcome, because....?

Originally Posted by ShyGuy

The only reason these merger rumors started is because Frontier announced a merger with Spirit, then jetBlue announced their interest in Spirit, and Alaska getting merged this year was a guaranteed outcome, because....?

Originally Posted by WHACKMASTER

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.

Originally Posted by IFlyEm

There's a lot more to the rumors then piggybacking on Frontier, Spirit, and JetBlue.
Like:

• The the SEC filling giving the execs more protection in the event of a buyout.
• Brad leaving the board
• Patricia M. Bedient appointment to the board
• Discontinuing mediation with ALPA
• Ben's total disappearance from public eye

Are any of these a smoking gun? No. But there's enough smoke here to draw a pretty solid conclusion that we're either looking at someone, someone is looking at us, or a combination of the two.