I wouldn’t say any of us are happy to see this happening. It’s one of those things where you hope the “sting” hurts enough where management actually does something to fix the problem and prevent it from happening again since in the past it’s mostly been all talk and no action. When you’ve been with a company for 15-20–30+ years and see just how bad it’s gotten with Ed at the helm you can’t help but sit back and watch the show unfold in the hopes that it’s bad enough that maybe...just maybe they’ll actually do something this time. Getting rid of Ed would be a good first step. He’s a banker that wants to be a politician so just let him go do that instead of making our airline be the laughing stock of the industry.

I bet there would be overwhelming approval from the employees (and shareholders) to bring back Richard Anderson.

He has quite the fan club on skyhub. Every townhall they fall all over themselves to be the first ones to post their praise and devotion.

I think everyone here wants the company to do well. I just don't necessarily want them to get all that success by doing it on the backs of the pilots. They've mismanaged this and gone out of their way to make make it more difficult than it has to be for optics. They've had all their employees being paid by the government for the past year, but they don't have qualified crews to fly the schedule??? I think all of us would agree that, Covid or not, this job has gotten progressively worse over the past couple of years. They push every FAA and contract limit they can with the schedule with minimum ground times, maximum flight times and the optimizer...and then take a poke at the pilots in the latest release about getting their shots?? I feel like we are the horse Boxer in Animal Farm.... we keep saying "I will work harder" while they keep adding bricks to the load with very little consideration to us as pilots other than wondering if is there more work they can squeeze out of us?

they spent the last year playing games with mine and my fellow pilots’ livelihoods, they continuously refused cost savings measures that would have allowed them to recover quickly over “optics” and have tried to make us the bad guy to our fellow co workers because we would not reduce hours while our paychecks were paid by taxpayers. They refused to fix this problem after our thanksgiving and Christmas meltdowns even with the knowledge that the vaccine was most likely going to be distributed by summer. I’m not happy this is happening, but anyone who was looking farther than right infront of their face could have seen this coming. They have used every opportunity in this pandemic to try to hammer us and extort concessions. The fact that behavior is continuing to have consequences might get us some much needed change in leadership and might even discourage similar behavior in the future. I know this won’t likely happen but one can hope

There are always going to be sycophants and there are always going to be haters. I just try to drive the bus and stay in my lane.

Man, ‘they’ really have it out for you.

Interesting response to a post that simply stated what has happened. What part of his post was wrong?

Middle seat is open (but only for 2 days).

Also: Crew and passenger safety our number one priority.

I love the smell of science in the morning. It smells like, %#@$#$$t.

It really is a shame, because most of the animosity towards corporate "leadership" seems unnecessarily provoked or self-induced. This forum has captured many of those instances.

A5S

like someone farted in your mask?

specifically flight ops leadership. Not a “have it out for me”, and I’m generally a positive person, but that’s just a perspective on how I’ve seen things run. At least from where I sat, JL and RG wanted to twist the knife and never considered the consequences. I hope Things are run better in the future and I hope the operation falling apart every holiday does not continue to be the norm.

Happy Easter!

It’s as if there’s a causal inverse relationship between holiday pay and cancellations. Hmmmm....

I agree. Really weird. Happy Easter.

people probably mad about the bonuses
Happy Easter!!!

Can you give a brief synopsis of your job over the past year? Were you forced to change seats? Bases?

You should see the looks I get when I stand next to a homeless person and gloat over his misfortune. I tell any passerby that "they brought it on themselves, should have seen it coming, and should own up to their mistakes" I then add, 'It's not up to me to fix their stoopid".......then one of those passerby calls me "insensitive, callous and full of white privilege"


Yea, kinda like that....just things that make me go...." Hmmm"

Like blocking the last row of seats on the Airbus for FA safety -- unless we can sell them.

We do that because safety is our number one priority, right after revenue. ;)

But we are no longer about making money, Ed says.

I would argue that this has nothing to do with holiday pay. UAL found a way to displace folks and retire others smartly, and also kept everyone current via reduced monthly schedules. Meanwhile our brain trust was playing the "what's a SIL" game and had 1700+ pilots quit flying cold turkey. I wonder why they don't have enough pilots to fly the schedule. Hmmmm.....

More like disappointed our "'A' student" came home with a D- on the big math test.

Re UAL....weren't most posters here saying the UAL LOA was an abomination and divisive and destroyed their pilot group? Was gonna harm all ALPA unions?

Not picking on you specifically....just remember the hew and cry here and over there at the time, now we hold them up as "utopia". Utopia....dystopia.....sound alike....maybe it's a matter of perspective ....or quite possibly time is relative?

I have been impressed by UALs covid strategy from the start. Innovative solutions from their union and company. I think our union wanted to foster a similar relationship initially but our management was more concerned with keeping the other workgroups non-union. While I hate to see our company fall on its face, again, at some point our leaders need to be held accountable.

The UAL deal worked because the .gov paid full salaries. Ours didn't work because of the MOAD and UNA usage. They got lucky, we were caught being overly cautious.

"What's a SIL"

Pretty much sums it up.

UAL management made it a priority to keep all of their pilots current and ready for a recovery. They struck a deal with ALPA which included a few nice carrots, which are permanent, and a little raise at the end of the tunnel. Our management treated us like the enemy.

Yes....and they divided their group into thirds. The top third took a 10% ALV cut, the middle third a 20% ALV cut and the bottom third a 50% cut all in an attempt to eliminate furloughs(lots of other moving parts in there) But still, I stand by the assertion that most Delta posters opining about their deal were uniformly negative and expressed a sentiment of "UAL sold us (Delta) down the river".

When does reading the tea leaves properly constitute being astute and when does it just become "luck"?

I think the main point is not "how" they (UAL) did it, but they fact they prioritized keeping everyone current.

I personally think splitting UAL into thirds was divisive...I know my UAL counterparts felt it was when they found out they were taking a much larger cut than the top third was.

Could UAL have achieved the same 'everyone remains current' objective with straight SIL's and VLOAs? I don't know...my magic 8 ball broke a while ago.

However, Delta appeared to be more concerned with optics and unions, so they MOAD'd before they VEOP'd and they didn't SIL...I would guess maintaining pilot currency for the recovery wasn't even in Delta's top 5 objectives.

Let’s not fall over the UA agreement as if it were some sort of amazing deal for the pilots. It was a B scale (and a C scale) for all intents and purposes. Had the gov cheese not come in, their deal would’ve looked a lot worse than ours. Both companies/unions gambled, UA won this round.

Now, that doesn’t mean Delta should continue to double down on their problem. There is a solution...come to the union with concessions to US for relief. Will it happen? Of course not. Ed and JL are too prideful for that.

I will say, I won’t be shocked if JL is thrown under the proverbial (air)bus for Meltdown III: Easter Drift and is canned by Ed.

UAL did use a variety of SILs. My friends there were bottom third, some of them captains. They supported the deal because it had hard limits and helped a company in crisis. I didn’t think their deal would have been a good fit here, but I did admire the coordination between union and management over there.

I commend you on your most excellent use of acronyms! You must have been a screen writer for Good Morning Vietnam. 😊

Their deal was terrible for the pilot group and all pilot groups, to an extent. There were small details that made it good for some in their group and one very small but very important detail that made it very advantageous for the company. No matter what hours you dropped down to in their deal they had to WORK for them. By working they stayed current. Our fate was sealed with the MOAD. It had nothing to do with our deal. Our fate was sealed when we chose our cut with an ax path vs the tempered and educated approach SW took.

We are now behind the training curve and will just play whack a mole for then next 2-3+ years. Or lose market share. It’s just that simple.

I get that were are in the middle of a pandemic but 1.) everyone knew last summer that vaccines were coming soon and someone somewhere at Delta had to say, “hey, maybe we should rethink travel demand and get ahead of the curve.” And 2.) didn’t the government basically pick up all labor costs for most of the year? Why would you not get people in a position where they could actually work?

It’s obvious that management’s guess that this would be a 5 year recovery was a bit pessimistic. We overreacted. We “over-indexed.”

Let the premium pay flow like chocolate from a fountain at a hotel Easter buffet (for the next few years.)

Management desire to thrust pilots into the useless and highly inefficient UNA status is what I believe caused each of our numerous meltdowns. To my knowledge, no other carrier used this “novel” technique to save pennies on the dollar. You get what you pay for.

Exactly right. They may have saved $5000/mo per pilot by displacments and UNA but the $50,000+ sim cost to switch jets quickly eats up that savings, notwithstanding the cost of the current personnel crisis. They were trying to stick it to the pilot group.

Thank you for settling that for everybody. I am sure 100% of the UAL would agree with you( at least you seem to think so).

More like figuring out our A student (Ed) was a D- student all along but was making A’s only because he was copying Richard’s answers. Once he lost his cheat sheet the true grades came through...

“Delta teams have been working through various factors, including staffing, large numbers of employee vaccinations and pilots returning to active status. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and the majority have been rebooked for the same travel day.”
-Delta PR

or a tech writer for Airbus.