Passed the BOD. 3M budget.

 

Bring it on. It might not be the right decision, but let's at least get it all out to the membership to figure it out.

 

and a dues holiday… can the day get any better

 

Assuming the APA and ALPA can actually agree to terms, which is far from a given.

 

It will be interesting to see what they come up with. I think there's willingness on both sides to make it work. Hopefully they come to reasonable terms then the membership can vote on it. Then we can finally put to bed the question of does the majority want it.

 

I try to be open minded about things like this, but I’m just not sure how engaged our pilot group is with regards to anything. National elections were approximately 25% of the pilot group- I doubt if it will even be that high for the run-off for the Sec-Treas.

According to R2025-05 Rev 5, only 58% of the respondents to polling conducted by UNH supported forming a merger negotiation committee. That is not an overwhelming majority. Additionally, no where in the document does it say what percentage of the pilot group actually took the time to answer the polling questions.

I get it, there are sample numbers and statistics and other things that pollsters use to quantify data that help contribute to the decision making process.

I’m just not sure that anything the Merger Committee does will be taken seriously by the vast majority of the pilots.

Hopefully I’m wrong. I’m all for the majority voice being heard- whichever voice that is.

 

I’ll admit I don’t know jack about this, but 3M sounds insane.

 

If you start adding up travel and hotels/per diem in the DC area along with flight loss pay across all the man hours that would be involved in hammering an agreement out, it’s probably not.

Let’s say you’ve got a team of 10 that goes up to Herndon for 2 weeks. GSA per diem is $110/night for hotels and $68/day for meals incidentals. Oh, by the way, government travelers struggle to find hotels for that cost. So let’s say at least $200/night.

Lodging: 200x10x14 = $28,000

M&IE: 68x10x14 = $9,520

2 rental minivans @ 350/wk is easily $1000 after tolls and fuel.

Flight Loss pay…don’t know the formula here but if I take a swag and say an FO is worth $20k/month and a CA is $30k split evenly between seats across half a bid month?

$125,000. So $165k total roughly? And the travel wasn’t really even the expensive part. That’s before you get lawyers and outside consultants involved. Or the full time pilots that will be working on this in DFW, though to be fair there’s probably a lot of overlap with the travelers above. Plus presumably there’s multiple rounds of polling, roadshows if a deal is hammered out, etc.

Anyway, three million ain’t what it used to be.

Guessing APA BOD figures that there won’t be much appetite for millions more and if a great deal doesn’t get worked out, the cost will be enough to put the merger talk to bed.

 

Terms? I doubt ALPA would care to treat it like a merger. AA would join under the existing, established structure, and would then by virtue of their not-insignificant constituency be able to attempt to make any changes.

I suppose allocation of current APA financial resources might be open to discussion, ie how much reverts to APA members vs. war chest for new ALPA MEC. I don't know how much if any ALPA National would want in the national kitty.

 

Isn't that why APA bought a house in DC?

APA has something like $700m in their bank account right now, nfw should that go to ALPA.