Pay banding is not a concession. Pay banding is not a win for the Pilot group. The Devil is in the details. Pay banding up is a win for the Pilot group. Pay banding down (never gonna happen) is a win for DAL.

Pay banding up will probably require fewer Pilots (totally unknown) but will definitely increase pay for hundreds if not thousands of Pilots.

It doesn’t bother me if 777/350 guys get a 10% raise if 330/765 guys a 15% raise. They would still be the top pay rate.

DAL is hiring thousands of Pilots in the next few years it would not impact anyone in house if we hire 10% less than whatever number we would hire without pay banding.

Should we try to improve pay, thus QOL for thousands of DAL Pilots, or prioritize additional hiring through continued inefficiencies?

Finally it seems like the “gain” In efficiencies that we always assume would follow banding is not as pronounced as we may have thought it would be.

Scoop

If pay banding up is good for the pilot group...then good

Just have an effective date down the road....say 2 years , that enables people to use their seniority to reposition into the new band(possibly down to smaller equipment paying the same "up" band). That precludes an instantaneous "windfall" while preserving "seniority"

Would an AE cover this requirement?

Possibly....but I don't think so due to not enough movement on 1 individual AE and/or seat locks

That makes sense from our side. I can’t see the company agreeing to a free pass for everyone though.

Were you one of our negotiators on POS TA1 a few years back monkey man???

Pay banding=stagnation in every senior category. Forget about any movement in ATL320A, SLC320A, SLC7ERA, SEA7ERA, MSP320A, MSP7ERA, ATL 7ERA..the list goes on and on. Senior pilots would sit at the top of the category with no incentive to move up..eliminating the natural progression for everyone to move up to bigger, higher paying aircraft throughout their career.

Bad idea in my humble opinion.

CG

An ideal solution from a pilot perspective would be to reconfigure training with more breaks to be closer to a pilot's normal work schedule. Make the hotels better and the overall experience can not be a QOL hit. It could also be set up so the training throughput would be the same, so you'd have the same number of pilots making it through a month, but a higher number in training at a given time which is what the company wouldn't like.

There are a lot of downsides to pay banding. Pilots I've talked to at United don't like it and one reason is because it has made the seniority for the fleets more evenly spread. We can bid to concentrate on pay or a higher quality of life because some pilots chase the money while others prefer the higher days off. Pay banding harms the ones who would bid quality of life and essentially removes that option. That is one reason for calls that if banding was implemented to allow a free ticket to swap equipment. Don't think that banding would mean that you would be able to simply bid the same schedule you do now at higher pay.

Could you please expound on why these NB positions would stagnate? And if say 320A was senior, wouldn't that mean wherever they'd previously flee would go junior? I'm thinking bands could be WB rate, 7ER/797? rate, 320/737 rate, 717/220, etc. So in this hypothetical, why would nobody leave the 320?

I assume in this scenario, people go to training primarily for what they've always done it for: Base-Seniority(scheduling), type of trips. Nobody would be switching within the same band just for pay, as they don't already today on those similar sized fleets.

The one example of paybanding we have on property - the 757/767 - nobody seems to like much. Line consensus seems to be that the 757 dragged down the 767 rate too much, and the 767 didn't raise the 757 rate enough.

If pay banding's only negative effect was to reduce training churn (which as others have pointed out is debatable given results at AA & UA), I'd consider it a decent bargaining chip in negotiations, something that could be traded away for desired goodies with negligible effect on the pilot group. But as others have pointed out above, non-banded payrates play a major role in allowing some to chase money and others to chase QOL. The fact that we're not really one airline but like 18 different airlines that you can shift between every couple years as the circumstances of your life change is one of the best things about this place, IMHO.

Last thing I'll note is that there's not really such a huge disparity in our payrates to begin with...our lowest 12 year captain rate (717) is 72% of our highest 12-year captain rate (777/350), despite the 777 holding nearly 3 times the people and much more cargo. If considering only narrowbody equipment, the 717 pays 90% of the much larger 737-900. If we do want to move towards banding, an intermediate step could be to narrow those percentages in the next contract, but this does mean that larger equipment payrates will stagnate relative to smaller equipment payrates.