Then I'd say YOU got a windfall gain in seniority.

 

I lost relative percentage. I don't see how that's a windfall gain. My percentage was all I cared about. It's not my fault UAL had pilots with more longevity at my percentage. That just showed how stagnant things were there. Our upgrade time to Captain was 4 years, at UAL it was 16 years. That's why relative percentage is a big factor.

 

Percentage is B.S. You gained 7 years seniority on the guy who is now stuck behind you for the rest of his career. That's a windfall by definition.

By your reasoning the #1 VX Capt. should be listed next to the #1 AS Capt. who has 25 years seniority over him. He should be bidding over at least 200 AS pilots with 20 or more years of seniority? Sorry, I call B.S. on that.

 

That's why mergers suck, dude.

 

percentage isnt bs. the number one mistake pilots make is look at their doh and cling to that like their first born child. doh in mergers becomes largely irrelevant. it all ends up being category and class, longevity, and career expectations. your assumption that doh is fair only works when both pilot groups are relatively the same age, longevity, with similar hiring sprees and likewise spread among pilots for widebody and narrowbody. in the end percentages matter. you are right that the number one virgin guy won't go next to the number one alaska. most likely the arbitrators will give alaska a decent preference in the sli because of much higher longevity. you might see something like the first 200 positions on the list are all alaska pilots. the next 200 positions are the first 50 virgin and the next 150 alaska guys with a ratio starting with an alaska guy, and the next 300 positions are the next 200 alaska guys and 100 virgin guys, starting with an alaska guy. so on so forth

there is no doubt that this is an extremely tough merger for two main reasons. both groups have same career expectation of narrowbody captain. it would be a lot easier if alaska had widebodies but as it stands narrowbody domestic captain is the career expectation of all. and the biggest factor of course is the skewed longevity with a much more senior group from an airline that has been around for many decades versus one that has been flying around for just about 9 years.

 

That is because everything in this industry is about seniority and is based on your DOH. Pass travel benefits priority = based on DOH. Pay = based on DOH. Vacation = based on DOH. Upgrades/base bidding = normally based on DOH. Monthly schedules = based on DOH. Then you have seniority in a merger = based on what some lawyer who is totally clueless about the airline industry thinks is fair. Hopefully the future is bright enough that in the end it won't matter.

 

doh works like that because you are looking at within that own airline for all those things you just said. its uniform and consistently in order but again only for this one company. you get two companies involved and doing a doh is largely almost never a fair and equitable result. neither is stapling and neither is straight relative.

 

This is exactly why you slot the 9 year VX Captains with the 9 year AS Captains and ratio the list down from there. But I'm pretty sure you're gonna have VX guys make the argument, "My career expectation was to be the #1 Captain on my SLI, so I should go to the top of the AS list."

Sorry, but that's not even close to what ALPA defines as "career expectations." Career expectations means the expectation of holding a wide body position PERIOD. Since neither of these two airlines have wide bodies, the whole career expectations argument is a moot point. You cannot extrapolate the term to mean something YOU think it is....retirement position, seniority number, non-rev status, etc. It means one thing and one thing only: When you got hired did your airline have wide bodies on the property?

 

What 9 year captains? There's like 2. That is one of the many difficulties in trying to guess how this integration will play out.

 

Exactly my point....