boeingdvr

Upgrade ? Yeah right. 10 year upgrade easy.

QOL, and PAY, try again...

Work on X days to make a few extra bucks. Uhh- nope. Your junior.

Come on over, and see for yourself. We would love to have you.

RyeMex

Things are going to get a lot worse here before they begin to get marginally better. I expect that we will see the threat of furloughs in the near to medium term. Atlas / Southern is not somewhere you want to be on the junior end of the seniority lists right now.

WhaleWrangler

AAWW management have / are playing a dangerous game. I don't think they realize that the AMZ flying is as safe as they are taking for granted. Bezos is not going to watch his product suffer at their hands.

Sorry for the pilots who now have an arbitrated contract and now watch flying moved due to management games.

Excargodog

It’s just like the regionals a couple of years ago. The whole industry is going to have to see shortfalls, lines with no one to fly them even at 300%. And then - and only then - will you start to see systemwide improvements.

But before that happens you are going to lose all your experienced FOs, the ones who would and should have been upgrading in a few years, because the LCCs and a few majors will snap them up in a heartbeat. And maybe even a few of the surprisingly senior captains who simply get tired of eternally doing unpaid LOE on FOs with 2000TT.

wjcandee

This is being well-ventilated in the Atlas threads, where it has been discussed for over a week.

In my view, this is nothing more than Amazon pulling planes that AAWW can't staff/operate at the tempo that Amazon is requesting, which will result in the redistribution of the existing pilot pool among other aircraft so they can operate at the tempo that Amazon wants. My expectation is that everyone who can fly a 767 will be able to be as busy as they want to be.

Look at ABX: Amazon has dramatically-increased the tempo of flights on their 762s and the current ABX routes require the use of more than the 6 dry-leased planes. And they just added an ONT-ATL-BWI-RIV-BWI-STL-ONT route with two aircraft. In other words, they are giving ABX a lot more business now. ABX is the most-expensive carrier of the three for any customer to use, because of its work rules, yet Amazon has stepped up its use of ABX, because it has pilots with available time due to the slow loss of other business. Amazon is picking up a good bit of the slack in ABX aircraft and pilots, even from the most-expensive provider to use.

To me, this actually helps the AAWW pilots. The stock was down a significant percentage on Friday, which means this got the attention of shareholders -- AAWW is losing the battle of attrition and has failed to perform for a major customer (and warrantholder) by being unable adequately to staff flights and to sufficently-utilize the customer's capital assets.

This is exactly the goal of the pilots -- to make AAWW recognize that it needs labor peace to grow/maintain its business -- something that management has denied -- and now a major customer/warrantholder is taking visible public action because the union was right.

AAWW has in Amazon a very dispassionate, businesslike, numbers-driven company. I don't think that a significant intent of the move was to "send a message" to AAWW. Rather, I think that Amazon made a straightforward calculation that to get what it needed in a timely fashion, it needed to reallocate away from AAWW and to ATI, where there is labor peace and an ability to operate smoothly a growing number of aircraft. (I think that with now 8 additional 767 aircraft in 2019, combined with an increased operational tempo for their existing Amazon aircraft, they're probably nearing their reasonable ability to expand in the short term, and so it behooves AAWW to right itself.)

I think that the number of aircraft that leave Atlas will relate solely to how many aircraft AAWW can properly-staff.

And we will ignore for now the goatrope that is SOOs 737 operation, which was supposed to expand to how many aircraft again? And their pilots are saying that they can't staff 4?

boeingdvr

The SA 737 operations. Good luck staffing that. We are losing 15-25 per month on the 76/74

The 73 is even a lower paying aircraft.

The 777- obviously a draw for the type, however 4 laps around the world gets old quick.

nitefr8dog

ABX is actually cheaper than ATI at this time even with our work rules...at least according to the 3rd party company the the Federal Mediator requested the Union and Company use to crunch the real numbers...by quite a bit.

wjcandee

Well, I certainly don't have access to those numbers, and I respect you, so I stand corrected. I have a feeling it depends upon whether the day/night transition rules are implicated on a particular route, because I know how many extra pilots it takes at that point, but that the overall number is lower is interesting.

So I should correct my analysis to the following:

Amazon has added 8 aircraft this year at the most-expensive of the three carriers for it to use, and upped the tempo of the 14 aircraft that were already there, apparently because that carrier can staff the additional work, has labor peace, and is operating reliably.

Similarly, it has added routes and increased tempo at the carrier that, although it does not have labor peace, has extra capacity in planes and pilots and a proud and experienced pilot group that gets the job done despite the toxic labor relations there.

In short, Amazon seems to be rewarding performance and capability rather than playing some Machiavellian game.

Cujo665

As I said many months ago. Pilots are the new currency, not capacity contracts. The company with the pilots will get the flying. This is good for your contract negotiations.

Atlas had a choice. Accept a smaller profit by paying their pilots more, or lose the revenue altogether. They chose poorly. Hopefully, they can fix it and stave off additional bleeding.

wjcandee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubw5N8iVDHI