ROBsINtheHOOD

This ALL starts and stops with Amazon. They demand and expect top level performance , while offering bottom of the barrel contracts , and this just rolls downhill... They refuse to pay these wet lease operators a fair amount and then leave it to these wet lease operators to suffer the financial squeeze - biting the bullet so to speak. It's a heck of a business plan..... until it blows up in your face. Amazon has the attitude that there will always be a sucker out there that will fly their goods , for the cheapest rewards. Who's going to blink first ? Time for Amazon to get with the program and pay up. That being said - Atlas / Polar / Southern better get their acts together too.

Vital Signs

Amazon is excellent at getting others to do all of the heavy lifting and hard work for VERY little reward.

4runner

What a cry baby. Try working on a fishing boat in Alaska. Someone who has never done manual labor, gets a warehouse job and writes about how hard it is. Then charges $$$ for her experiences.

wjcandee

I respectfully disagree (except with the part about AAWW needing to get its act together). Is the Amazon business so significantly-less-profitable than AMC (U.S. Government), DHL, Boeing, Panalpina? If it is, why did Atlas work so hard to get the 737s? Atlas offered rates/prices to Amazon to get its business in lieu of it going to NAC, Amerijet, Western Global, ATSG, etc. They negotiated rates, just like absolutely every other customer does. Atlas negotiated those contracts with an expectation that it would be paying more in pilot costs than it currently does. It's making a profit from the delays in reaching an agreement with its pilots.

There is more money in those contracts to pay the pilots more; it is their choice (and their right to choose) to leave it on the table for now.

Atlas must be negotiating good rates with DHL, because Atlas keeps taking actual planes from ABX (9 at last count). Kalitta, with its top-of-the-barrel pilot contract, is also taking planes away from ABX and getting planes instead of ABX. I don't see either pilot group being castigated for flying what were (and should be) ABX's aircraft.

As to the coddled little fired reporter who deigned to do actual hard work so she could write the kind of book that was already written over and over in France during the Industrial Revolution, the most telling thing is that she, with her college education, was "surprised" at how upbeat her coworkers were in the "brutal" conditions they endured working in a warehouse or call center or McDonald's. Maybe she should have tried to work in the factory that produced her iPhone or Gucci bag or Prada shoes or even Macy's shirt. Places that don't have Worker's Comp, minimum wage, overtime, or any of the myriad protections we enjoy here in the US as the result of our hard-earned labor laws. Or, heck, she could have worked on any airport ramp. Physical labor is hard. The average UPS driver is taking just as much Advil as her coworkers in the warehouse were. It's the nature of that kind of work. I don't need to read her book because I have watched plenty of episodes of Dirty Jobs and Undercover Boss where one sees exactly the same thing -- good people working physically much harder than I have to in order to put food on the table for their families, and doing it with enthusiasm. There are a million causes of this, and Amazon is but a very-tiny one of them.

JackStraw

Who cares?

tonsterboy5

See above in bold

Elevation

So, first, BoeingDVR please be careful about publicly posting details from proprietary/confidential information. That can come back to bite you, and we need all the good people we can get.

maxjet

Atlas keeps taking actual planes from ABX (9 at last count). Kalitta, with its top-of-the-barrel pilot contract, is also taking planes away from ABX and getting planes instead of ABX. I don't see either pilot group being castigated for flying what were (and should be) ABX's aircraft.

????????? ABX aircraft? If they are ABX aircraft how then can they be at AAWW or K4?

Elevation

Second:
Whether or not the margins on Amazon/DHL contracts are fantastic or abysmal, I suggest we evaluate things of an objectives-based perspective.

Our goal is to get paid more thereby attracting pilots who in turn facilitate growth and stability of Atlas/Southern/Polar. In order to sustain the company in the long-term we need a higher tier compensation package to avoid another labor crunch in just a few more years. Regardless of contract details, our viability is doubtful without crews. So we are really thinking about the long-term survival of Atlas and rebuilding the knowledge base that we've recently lost to better carriers.

In terms of safety risk to our viability as a company, we're more than 4 times as likely to have an accident on every departure as compared to an average US airline. Reviewing the past 10 years of data (source: BTS operational data, NTSB stats and NTSB 830 accidents) we're significantly worse than Kalitta, ABX, and all big-name carriers. ATI approaches our accident per departure rate due to an event they had with a passenger out of Yokota some years ago, but they're still significantly better than us.

We're flying more departures every year. So statistically we're moving towards our next accident at an ever-increasing clip. We aren't seeing meaningful operational changes. In fact, we're getting statements lauding the systems we have in place. Realistically how many more accident-level events can we sustain?

Our survival as a company hinges on getting better compensation to inject and retain knowledge on our flight decks. This applies from a market perspective and from an evaluation of operational safety. Nothing else will matter if we can't get or keep people. Changes in training and admin procedures only work if we keep the people we train.

So why worry about the margins with the customers? We have to pursue a course for the highest compensation we can get, or we won't have a company to fly for. This is an existential fight for us.

wjcandee

The 9 767-200s now operated by Atlas were Airborne Express 767s that ended up under DHL ownership and were continually operated by ABX. DHL put the operation of those aircraft out to bid and contracted with Atlas to operate them. When I say "ABX aircraft", I mean ABX's to operate unless and until DHL took them away, which it did, because it cut a deal with Atlas to operate them. Under ABX's scope clause (as clarified), those could not, for example, have been operated by ATI, but apparently nobody sees a problem with another 1224 (or non-1224) carrier operating them.

All of the DHL business was ABX's to lose. One reason Atlas and Kalitta may be able to offer a financially-superior contract (if they did) is that certain aspects of ABX's work rules (including the day-night transition safety rules) mean that on certain routes it takes up to 30 percent more pilots to operate an ABX aircraft than an Atlas aircraft on the same timetable. Why other 1224 carriers don't insist on the same thing, I don't know.