When this posting came out late Friday afternoon many of you may have noticed along with it, is an updated fleet plan. When compared to the last fleet plan of 11/17/09, which I believe is relatively close to our current aircraft in operation, you will notice a significant reduction in our trunk fleet. It shows a reduction of 49 wide body and 30 narrow body aircraft by May 09, with further reductions continuing in 2010. For those of you seeking information about this, I have a little to share. I called the ALPA union office of contract enforcement this morning and my block rep. I'm in block 7 and my rep VT, was more willing to impart information than was the person I talked to in Contract enforcement at ALPA. He said they have asked the V. P. of flt ops. PC for clarification on these reductions. Specifically; are they going to happen by the end of May? Is this a total reduction of the aircraft in each fleet or does this exclude aircraft that are not utilized due to heavy MX or other out of service reasons? He told me they were awaiting his response. His opinion was that they were probably not going to park this many aircraft, but that he would expect the excess bid when published, to be larger than 08-03 which was cancelled last year. He also didn't rule out the possibility that this could be another one of their tactics to try and fill the vacancies in HKG. Either way if this reduction is implemented it will be the largest reduction by Fedex in the companies entire history. Obviously, this will have a significant impact on every crewmember on the property. Well that is all the information I have and while it isn't very much at least it is something more than we're getting from any official source at the moment. If your reading this and talking to your fellow pilots and co workers about this stuff as I'm sure you are don't forget to call the union and your block rep. They need to hear from you. It's time we stood up for ourselves and each other. I believe it is also time that we made ourselves herd, for we have been a little to quiet through all of this.

 

I sure am glad we have a great "business like relationship" with management.

 

Yeah, Very professional of them to put out this posting late friday afternoon, as soon as flt. mgmt. was on their way out of the office for the weekend and the union offices were closed. I guess we can look forward to any excess or posting bid to come out in this same fashion. We'll have to start calling these Fridays "Black Fridays".

 

Not the over 60 crowd. Another big mucho gracias to our pal DW.

 

Maybe if we can get Hueys to start happy hour earlier they would release it earlier.

 

That's been the modus operandi for quite some time... nothing new here.

 

Oh no, I had an over 60 guy the other day who was very ****ed off by the BLG reduction that one benefit of seniority was that HE shouldn't have to take a pay cut at all. The "fair" solution was to "furlough" the junior guys, and keep the pay levels where they were.

He later relived his glory "fighter" days and discussed the importance of "not leaving your wingman," apparently his wingmen are only over 60! Thanks, dude.

 

I was in flight ops the other night...one room was those rapidly approaching 60, with some over 60 talking furlough the junior guy, and right around the corner, the other half was talking about "I'll take 48hrs to bank, and enjoy my time off to keep guys employed."

Both sets were a bit fired up to say the least. If they were in the same room, it probably would have gotten ugly..