What makes someone stick to Delta over United? And vice versa.. Currently faced with the decision of one or the other. I'm OK with living in any base wishing for Houston-United or ATL-Delta.

I've read in threads a lot say to choose United because Delta has hired so many pilots in 2015 (pre pandemic) and WB captain (A3330/350)would take so long but at the same time so many choose Delta this 2021/2022 I'm wondering how come?

 

Have you looked at what the various majors paid out in terms of profit sharing in the last normal year? (2019 profit sharing paid at he beginning of 2020, prepandemic) While last performance does not guarantee future returns, Delta paid more in profit sharing than UAL, AAL, and SWA combined. IIRC, you could’ve doubled the AAL numbers and still Delta paid out more than those three combined. While not perfect, Delta’s profit sharing was indicative of a well run company (despite our righteous gripes).

That said, basing is an easy reason to choose one major over another.

 

I wouldn't go to a place based of their past profit sharing that's just stupid. Go make more faster at UAL flying international WB's on first or second year pay. Our "hopeful" profit sharing will only get you close to that while you bust your but flying domestic RJ style trips.

 

I thought swa paid out pretty solid profit sharing close to ours, no?

 

Mostly basing/ease of commute/living close to family/friends, the rest is mostly just noise. No amount of WB opportunities would make me give up being able to sit reserve from my house. WBs are great and all, but they're certainly not the be-all and end-all of a highly lucrative career. Personally, I'd decide which place you'd rather live, then your decision is made. Best of luck.

 

This. Both are great companies. Both have hired a lot of pilots. Both have a lot of retirements.

You’ll have a great career at both. Decided where you want to live then go from there.

 

Emphasis added but otherwise agree.

Basing a multifaceted decision of this complex magnitude on a single category, based on published hourly rates, based on hiring/projections, is mostly GIGO number crunching anyway. So many more factors at play than that.

 

2020 profit sharing (from 2019 results):
DAL $1.6 billion https://news.delta.com/following-16b...000-employee-0
SWA $667 million https://www.southwestairlinesinvesto...2020-115901586
UAL $491 million https://unitedafa.org/news/2020/1/26...ht-attendants/
AAL $213 million https://news.aa.com/news/news-detail...I/default.aspx

If my boots off math is correct, the other three paid $1.371 billion combined, meaning AAL could’ve doubled up their numbers and the three still would not have equaled our total.

 

Those are kinda useless figures. How much of ours 1.6B went to the pilots vs other employees? How is that spread out with our pilot group size? All that matters for comparison is %. Wasnt it about 15-16%? What percent at SW/UA/AS?

 

The context of the original answer I gave was relative health and smartly run to turn a profit. Those numbers are relevant because for the four largest carriers, ranging in US market share between 14.9% (United) and 17.6% (American), it shows the relative ability to turn a meaningful profit from that market share. BTW, Delta was 17.5%, and Southwest was 16.9%. (https://www.t4.ai/industry/us-airlin...enger%20miles.) So from a roughly equivalent market share amongst the four largest, DAL paid out more than double the profit sharing than the three other largest airlines, representing 49.4% of the US market, compared to Delta’s 17.5%.

The question of diluting those relative profits over the employee groups isn’t entirely irrelevant, but is more difficult to determine with digging quite a bit. Feel free to supply analysis and references to prove that Delta’s profit sharing wasn’t substantially better than the other other three big airlines. One of the things that the original PS agreement got right was the accounting methodology in order to keep the company from playing accounting games to avoid paying out to us. I have heard some discussion that other airlines wrangled more advantageous accounting rules for themselves to keep from giving too much to employees, but I don’t have any real insight into that angle. Back to the question of profit relative to employee groups in 2019, please refer to my previous post on the PS payouts, then do your own math with respect to employee groups. (not all comparisons are true apples to apples, but are sufficient to reinforce the point that our last prepandemic PS was an appropriate and persuasive measuring stick between airlines)
AAL 133,700 employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAL/american-airlines-group/number-of-employees
UAL 96,000 employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/c...r-of-employees
DAL 91,000 employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/c...r-of-employees
SWA 60,800 employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/c...r-of-employees

Want to look at profit sharing paid just to pilots and the size of pilot groups? Be my guest and dig up those numbers. I doubt they paint a different picture than the company wide snapshot. If you want to nitpick beyond that level of granularity (because UAL has more WB aircraft, etc.), then I would suspect that short of a pronouncement from the Allmighty directly to you, that no answer will satisfy. I stand by my original post: basing is often the most persuasive factor in choosing between legacies, and then comparing PS in the last semi normal year leans heavily in Delta’s favor.