Agreed! take your hate elsewhere.

Brake,
Please remember, in the first offer SWA offered all AT captains to keep their seats - and the offer was rejected -BY AT union pilot representation. After this rejection, SWA management stepped and played hard ball with AT.

I think this merger will be an ugly one. For the sake of your health and your joy, spend less time on this forum and more time with your families. Mergers are terrible, terrible thigs to go through.

This is great advice. I'd say more than half the guys and gals at Virgin have been through mergers/buyouts before and almost all our doing as Aloha suggested. Just chill. Enjoy your time at home. Don't waste time worrying bout things you can't control.

Let's focus on getting a great JCBA and move forward as Alaska pilots.

Except SWA AT isn't a fair comparison. They were different unions. AS VX are both ALPA. There is already a policy in place. It's going to look a lot like everyone staying in their seats and close to relative seniority with a slight adjustment for longevity.

Yes mergers are terrible, but if you believe your superior airline grants you some kind of advantage, it doesn't. That's not anywhere in the policy.

Relative seniority would be a huge windfall for VX pilots. That is specifically prohibited by ALPA Merger/Frag policy.

1. No bump/no flush.
2. Ratio after 2007.

That's fair.

That would be a hit of a stretch

A guy who walked into class yesterday above a couple hundred Captains?

That's ok...

according to your method the first virgin guy shows up in the 2007 doh range. fair to you is a windfall for alaska pilots.

No VX pilot had a job prior to 2007. What is it about that you can't understand?

No bump, no flush guarantees the VX pilots all keep their Capt seats. Every single VX Capt would be the junior Capt on the combined system.

A 2007 ratio would put the average VX pilot ahead of the 2007 Alaska pilots simply because there are more of them. A windfall for VX, all be it a lesser one. Additionally, that system makes it more equitable when AS dumps the Bus if there happens to be a furlough.

There is no way, NO WAY relative seniority is anything but an enormous windfall for VX pilots, especially considering the relative age of the groups involved.

As an outsider, I have a question:

At my airline, my QOL is dependent on my seniority percentage in my seat. So if I want to avoid reserve, I better be in the top 70% or so. Weekends off? Maybe top 30%. My actual seniority number is completely irrelevant to this.

So with this in mind, I don't understand why a straight relative integration is such a windfall for VX. Everyone's percentage stays exactly the same, for both VX and AS pilots. If you had weekends off before, you still have them off. I completely understand that it feels unfair for some young kid at his young airline to get slotted next to an old timer at the old airline, but from a QOL standpoint, what actually changes for the old timer? Is the argument just purely emotional?

If you use the integration method I'm hearing from the AS guys here, you're gonna have a lot of captains at VX used to specific QOL, such as weekends and holidays off, and you're gonna make them all junior again. Their QOL will be destroyed.

So one method affects nobody's QOL, while another destroys a large segment of VX pilots' QOL. How is *that* fair?

EDIT: I promise I'm not trying to start any crap - I'm just curious about what I'm missing! :)

Maybe you should talk with the UAL merger guys. They said the exact same thing and 2005 CAL hires were put ahead of 1998 UAL hires and guess what? They were 7 years YOUNGER on average. Do you know why? Status and Category (which was pretty close to relative seniority).

Sorry but it's your Union merger policy. Age of the pilots isn't a factor there.