Ifly4u2c

everyone sending applications to Atlas in 3, 2, 1 ...

looks like, in the end of the day, this wasn't "just" another post about earth being flat

No Land 3

Just ask the TWA guys how well the AA merger worked for them... Mergers = bad...

itsjustajob

Got the scoop on this.

Nothing was disclosed about a possible acquisition of any carrier.

End of story.

The take home in all this, when a company puts something to the effect of “Not for distribution outside of X” on an internal document, don’t!

CallmeJB

Troll Trophy for Trolling AP News. Troll of the year.

Whaledriver101

Interesting article.

If it were "much ado about nothing" then why is UPS mgt. wanting to find these people(UPSet,,Commando,,etc).

Fact is,, Atlas is primed for a takeover,, merger,,whatever. Whether it be from Amazon or whoever. Even the mgt knows this. Our last 3 negotiation sessions we are extremely far apart on sick days(yeah,,, sick days).

Something WILL happen here in the next 6 months-1 yr.

CallmeJB

I've been saying 'new CBA coming 2Q18' for a year now. So far the events over the last year, and this summer, and now the lawsuit, are further supporting that hypothesis. Our customer enthusiasm, aircraft growth, and industry positioning indicate that we will be flying plenty of airplanes for a plenty long time to come. Atlas is a serious industry player, in a good position, and they know it will take a serious pilot contract to support that position.

However, our internal staffing is troubling. We've been hiring pilots LIKE CRAZY for two years, but our crew schedulers, ground ops, travel/hotel folks, training center support staff, etc. are massively understaffed. The infrastructure has not grown as much as the operation has. I wonder if they are planning on soon not requiring our own infrastructure.

I will amend my hypothesis to 'new CBA or some big changes coming 2Q18'.

Either way, strongly agree with you.

itsjustajob

Amazon has the warrants on Atlas, UPS and FedEx don't... That pretty much tells who has first dibs.

wjcandee

I can't say that I understand what presentation they are talking about, because the lawsuit doesn't describe it, other than to say that a link to it in a Dropbox account was posted on the IPA web site, and that they want to know who is [email protected] (or similar, I just looked quickly at the lawsuit on PACER).

When they are talking about "fleet plans", it certainly could be the case that some jr execs put together a presentation about buying Atlas, and, according to the lawsuit, presented it to "at least one Senior Executive", but that hardly means that anything is in the works. It's like an opinion, and we know what opinions are like -- everybody has one.

The actual paperwork on this thing is pretty-generic. There are no affidavits supporting anything that the lawyers allege, and the existence, importance, etc. of this information is only very-generically described. One has to take the lawyers' word for it that things are as they say, as there is nothing even approaching admissible evidence to support their contentions. And contentions like "several UPS pilots had copies of the powerpoint at a pilot's meeting", with no date, time, or information about how they purport to know that -- no direct evidence of that assertion -- is pretty weak. I certainly know a some judges that would want a lot more than this before granting expedited discovery and ordering a response in 5 days. Although the order requires a response in 5 days, a "response" to a subpoena in a civil case can be an objection, which then postpones the obligation to produce the information until the Court can address it or the parties work out an agreement. Presumably, the IPA will lodge objections and make Alston & Bird put some meat on the bones of their application vis a vis the Union website, and there are probably also some labor law issues that could be raised in response, as the requests are so broad in some places that the assertion could be made that they are fishing far beyond the waters they are claiming to be in. Although the order requires a response in 5 days, a "response" to a subpoena in a civil case can be an objection, which then postpones the obligation to produce the information until the Court can address it or the parties work out an agreement.

But Yahoo! and the powers that be at APC aren't obligated to spend their own resources to protect the privacy of the persons involved and probably much of an incentive to do so. And the breadth of information that UPS has requested is pretty-scary, including the identity of everyone that looked at the information in question -- EVERYONE.

wjcandee

Okay, so ignore (or mods delete) my post above; my time to edit ran out while I was spending waaaay too much time looking at the this lawsuit in more detail when I should have been out having a beer.

I can't say that I understand what presentation they are talking about, because the lawsuit doesn't describe it, other than to say that a link to it in a Dropbox account was posted on the IPA web site, and that they want to know who is [email protected].

Looking at the lawsuit again, they seem to be interested in a thread called: “Powerpoint Slide of UPS Growth Plans,” and
the responses to the posting that was located at: https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/u...thplans-2.html They don't seem to be interested in this thread, so I guess the fleet plan presentation wasn't about buying Atlas, which always seemed farfetched (or just stupid) to me. And although their definitions talk about that thread, it looks like they don't really make reference to it in their subpoena, so maybe they thought better about asking for the names of everyone on APC who posted about it. "All" they want from APC is the identity of “Commando,” “UPSet,” and “nightrider” and their IP addresses (I guess to do more sleuthing about everything those guys have posted anywhere about anything, because I didn't see anything (admittedly reading quickly) that actually tied those names to this particular alleged theft of business info. Do they just want to know who they are because they are "bad apples"? Is that a legitimate reason to seek that info?)


The actual paperwork on this thing is pretty-generic. There are no affidavits supporting anything that the lawyers allege, and the existence, importance, etc. of this information is only very-generically described. One has to take the lawyers' word for it that things are as they say, as there is nothing even approaching admissible evidence to support their contentions. And contentions like "several UPS pilots had copies of the powerpoint at a pilot's meeting", with no date, time, or information about how they purport to know that -- no direct evidence of that assertion -- is pretty weak. I certainly know some judges that would want a lot more than this before granting expedited discovery and ordering a response in 5 days. But indeed UPS got the order they asked for. Although the order requires a response in 5 days, a "response" to a subpoena in a civil case can be an objection, which then postpones the obligation to produce the information until the Court can address it or the parties work out an agreement. Presumably, the IPA will lodge objections and make Alston & Bird put some meat on the bones of their application vis a vis the Union website, and there are probably also some labor law issues that could be raised in response, as the requests are so broad in some places that the assertion could be made that they are fishing far beyond the waters they are claiming to be in.

But Yahoo! and the powers that be at APC aren't obligated to spend their own resources to protect the privacy of the persons involved and probably don't have much of an incentive to do so. And the breadth of information that UPS has requested from IPA is pretty-scary, including the identity of everyone that looked at the information in question -- EVERYONE. To wit:

"Documents evidencing member information, including the name,
address, email address, IP address, or other information that would
identify the person(s) who accessed any link on the Website to a
Dropbox folder where other individuals could view or download the
Presentation;"

I don't know what the information was (was this about the Japanese 767s?) that they're so upset about, but I would make the observation that while they are bellyaching about "some pilot spread the information", I have to wonder which of the junior executives that made the super secret presentation to the senior executive failed to sufficiently safeguard it that it was blasted all over the Internet. I would also observe that rumours abound in this industry because businesspeople regularly tell their spouses, coworkers and friends stuff that they aren't supposed to and it gets out. Just like in DC. It's not like most executives have the same sensitivity to control of business information that good lawyers do, or take the same steps every second of every day to make sure that stuff doesn't leak or isn't spoken of where it can be overheard.

METO Guido

Which of course, is exactly their intent. Violation of confidentiality agreements & insider trading leaks don't need result in charges being filed for something like this to have the desired effect. How much did you read about AMZN buying the grocery store before they chose to disclose it? Anonymity on any of these boards is fingernail deep. And "they" most certainly are not casual readers.