The A321 has issues for use transatlantic regardless of range. Several of the key airports are slot constrained at the prime international departure times on both sides of the pond. You are not going to pull a 767 off a slot for a A321 in the summer and lose 65 seats. In addition to the loss of seats you lose cargo. Pilot pay with that large loss of revenue is almost the same. Frequent fliers hate single aisle aircraft and if you read flyer talk go out of their way to avoid them. Range is still going to be an issue. Claimed range and real world range are two different animals. When you have a 150 mile headwind and get 320 on the track and your alternate is IAD for JFK real world range drops like a stone.

Big airplanes “generally” pay more because they generate much more revenue per mile or hour. They can “afford” to pay more.

C172, B717 and a B777 all leave full from ATL-MCO. Assume each passenger paid the same for a ticket. Which pilot(s) had the most responsibility and therefore liability? Which could afford to pay more?

That being said, our smaller aircraft have a much higher pilot casm and pay rate relative to our larger aircraft. What about legs per day? Doesn’t matter as far as revenue generation. Just because somebody does ATL-BHM 5 times, doesn’t mean they flew more RASM than the guy who just did ATL-SEA. Since almost 100 percent of passengers on those shorter legs are connecting, accounting practices allocate much of the revenue to the longer leg.

Of course in the whole pilot pay area, we can split it however we want like seniority based pay. But, assuming current contract value it would bring down our top pay rate to about the 767 level. That is great for those 767 and lower, but bad for those 767 and higher as there is nothing left above them.

I know we can always expand the pie, but I am just trying to give a realistic example of what it would look like today.

Sounds nice but Hawai’i is a very low yield market for us. I’d love to see all that happen but we have more profitable places to allocate assets.

Are you sure about that? I believe Singapore is the only airline to purchase the ULR variant and they only put 161 seats on the ULR (versus our 306) and they de-activate the fwd cargo door. That isn't a "normal" interior.

The ULR takes advantage of unused space in the wings to gain an extra 3,000+ gallons per side through additional piping and venting. Our 350s routinely depart with the ability to onload another 40,000 lbs in fuel but can't because of the Max GW for TO limit. The last one delivered (3513) bumped up the Max GW for TO about 11,000 lbs but that still leaves the ability to upload another 30,000 lbs +/- which makes the ULR a non-issue (at least for Delta).

They are flying it on a longer flight. With all interiors in the same configuration the 900 ULR is the longest range version.

​​​​​​With all interiors the same, the ULR is a waste of corporate dollars. The ULR and our last three aircraft (3513, 3514 and 3515) all have a 280 metric tonne GW limit. If you hit the 280 metric tonne GW limit before you fill your tanks on a regular 350, the extra fuel capacity of the ULR does you no good. The 350 would need a sizeable bump in GW to make the ULR variant appealing, much less be on par with the B777s.

To put the 350 GW "deficiency" into perspective, our B777s carry 10 less people but have GW limits roughly 40k higher for the ER and 150k higher for the LR. Granted those two variants are no where near as efficient as the 350 but they certainly are more capable as far as lift versus range.

When I went to in command years ago the then CEO commented he could afford to pay a 777 CA 500 an hour because the airframe generated the revenue to support it. He added he would not pay that rate because if he did we would demand 400 an hour for the 737 and the airframe would not support that rate.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t, but it is what we do as pilots. You can look at almost any airframe and you will hear a reason/justification why one should be paid the same as the next one up on the pay scale.

The fact is that the higher revenue aircraft to some extent, subsidize the smaller aircraft rates with their revenue. This is why pay banding to the top rate is easier when you have 100 777’s and say only 10 767’s instead of the opposite. With 100 777’s, banding does much less to pilot casm than if you only had 10 777 and 100 767’s. Very similar to our 737 fleet with only 10 -700.

I’m in favor of pay banding for numerous reasons. In response to “the big airplanes generate more money,” I reply “it’s hard to fill a 777 up without the feed of 717s and MD88s. That’s one (of many) reasons Pan Am failed. They couldn’t get approval for domestic routes to feed their international flying.

I think we all get the economics of plane capabilities. What we have is a much larger narrow body fleet and the pay disparity would benefit more pilots if we spread it across the system. We are not ever going to be a big airplane airline. We are and will continue being the higher end (therefore smaller capacity) premium airline people are willing to pay more for.