tsquare

That it just plain ridiculuous. By your deinition, a "senior" pilot is the oldest one. However a pilot reaches his seniority in a list is irrelevant. The mere fact that he is number 1 whether by retirement, firings of those above him or even premature death is irrelevant.

NWA320pilot

As of yesterday 148N and 9S for a total of 157.........

sailingfun

Quote:
Originally Posted by Stagger Lee
The term senior is extremely relative, as the guys you are calling senior are in fact mid-level pilots escalated by default, as the truly senior pilots ran away with their retirement payouts.


I am not sure if this was posted by a Delta pilot but who ever posted it has no actual knowledge of the Delta seniority list. The vast majority of pilots who took the early out at Delta were close to age 60. All but a handful would have been gone before the age 60 rule was changed to 65. If not one of the early outs had left the actual seniority list would look much the same today since they would have been gone now anyway. The only gain for mid level pilots was a 2 to 3 year improvement that gradually went away as the early retirement pilots would have hit age 60.

acl65pilot

Sailing;
Good post, but I as for a companies performance vs scope, I disagree.
I think that tying scope and its strength to what that companies financial performance is, is a stretch at best.
Look at CAL, and AMR. They are struggling because they did not go in to CH 11 and restructure and retire a ton of debt.
UAUA, went it to CH 11 and squandered it. LCC has been twice and done the same thing. It is not because they cannot fly the 76 seat jet at their feeders.
All of the success as an airline comes down to the financial wizards and how they layer their debt. That alone is going to be why some are going to be in CH 11, and soon if things do not improve.

As for looking at the numbers, when was the last time they were run? I am sure it was during CH 11 and they had a nice tilt to them. We asked that DALPA rerun the numbers, and that went nowhere. My questions is why does our MEC not want to rerun these numbers? If they have, why do they not want to share the findings?

satchip

Read the above posts by Sailing and ACL. Those two positions are sum it up perfectly. Sailing has a pragmatic results oriented approach that I think our MEC is following and furthermore its the direction I and many others support. ACL has voiced the source of our angst. If #1 is correct then whey do they treat us like mushrooms? I know we can't be privy to every piece of knowledge about the nuts and bolts of the business, but to refuse to take our concerns seriously (once again our impression) seems shortsighted at best. At worst it fuels the ones holding the pitchforks and makes the moderate ones gravitate to the extreme.

Slow, Alfa, Sailing, please use your influence on the union's leadership. This may look like a little fire now, but little fires grow into big fires if not stamped out early.

Bucking Bar

Sailing,

What you and our MEC overlook is that "Delta, Inc." did not furlough. In fact, Delta hired more pilots from 2000 to 2005 than it has in any other time in its history. Delta Connection carriers hired about three pilots for every Delta pilot furloughed and in many cases, furloughed Delta pilots found work at the DCI carriers that replaced them. No one could have conceived that the regional pilots would outnumber the mainline pilots in ALPA, but today that is nearly true, even though roughly half the DCI pilots are not in ALPA.

When a mainline job is replaced by a regional job, that IS A FAILURE OF SCOPE! When a union job is replaced by non union workers, THAT IS A FAILURE of scope. We have seen entry level Delta jobs vanish as Delta made a huge investment in new equipment. Over 11 billion dollars was spent replacing 727's, and 737-200's with Regional Jets, replacing Express and Shuttle with Comair and well, Shuttle, flown by Teamsters pilots.

Lets look at the genesis of that logic:
When our union's President starts to sound like United CEO Glenn Tilton, I start to get concerned....

I have had a long talk with these same people. It ends, in every case, with their admission that they have not updated their economic analysis since the concessionary negotiations in bankruptcy. They say that it is not just pilot costs, but also the cost of aircraft support, under wing baggage handling, gate agents and maintenance. Their argument overlooks the fact that Delta has consolidated most of these functions into Delta Regional Handling and Delta mainline (in the case of ASA) to save money establish control and be more efficient.

Besides, if their argument is true, why did we merge Delta and Northwest?

Aside from cost, there are additional revenue possibilities by operating 90 seat jets at mainline with 90 seats in them, as opposed to 76 seats. The sale of 14 additional seats has to be worth more than it would cost to pay an entry level Delta pilot for that work.Here, we agree. I do not advocate throwing out our MEC to replace them with a more radical version of the same thing.

We also agree that change is needed.

We MUST return to our core beliefs as a union. We will find power in unity and it is our best argument at the negotiating table. Rather than finding reasons why it is best to have a separate DCI, we need to be looking for ways to facilitate Delta pilots performing Delta flying.

This outsourcing started all the way back at Randy Babbitt, who now ironically is the head of a FAA Administration being lambasted for their regulation of a regional airline where training expenses had been stripped to the absolute core to make possible the vision of costs "a country mile lower" than ours. Mr. Babbitt has repeatedly said it was a mistake and that ALPA should have found a way to make this flying work at mainline. If Mr. Babbitt eventually saw the light, I hope the current generation in power can also come to this realization.

For starters, we need new numbers. As was resolved in Council 44, we need economic analysis of the benefits of unity. As you know, the MEC resolved by acclimation NOT to STUDY unity.

How do we deal with that? I dunno, you got any ideas?

NWA320pilot

Just got a PERP update, 168N and 10S for a total of 178!

Fly4hire

Seems to me the thought police is out in force. Never seen so many new members. I bet it's quiet over on the MEC board

To address a few of the latest obfuscations:

Slow: The RAH issue is not "silliness" - if the work was accomplished, but negated with a pen stroke, and who paid for it is very germane. It goes to the heart of the entire trust/work together, RA is our friend philosophy of the current MEC. I have asked the funding question repeatedly, and not even had the question acknowledged. I guess it's sort of like suspecting your spouse may be cheating but not wanting to confront them because you don't want the answer. BTW I'm sure you are not running for anything - your term is not up yet.

Stagger: Very few have attempted to make this a junior vs. senior issue, yet your very first post attempts to redefine the entire issue as one of junior vs. senior for the obvious purpose of polarizing it along seniority lines (instead of the % of flying that has been given away to non-DAL pilots) and portraying the "Scope Chickens" as marginalized junior pilots who will "get it" when they become senior. 'Cept if we keep going in the direction we are all we will be is very old "teenagers". Yes Dad.

I do have to give the MEC (Slow, Alfa, Stagger and all our new friends) credit for the communications and "re-education" on the issue. As someone else said this is more communications than we've had in ages. Thank you for keeping to the high road even if we don't agree. The old NWA MEC would have attempted to marginalize us "Scope Chickens" as a radical group of junior malcontents who are not representative of the pilot group, and then claim we are causing "Scope Fatigue" among the MEC and say that our vocal stance on the issue is actually harming their efforts to fight for Scope our protections.

(For any musically inclined posters here start thinking about that YouTube video on Scope. What a rich visual tapestry -throw in sleepy pilots, twisted metal, and fat guys in suits, pilots in diapers, others in unemployment lines and we might do more for the "cause" than Congress and Herndon ).

satchip

My thanks and gratitude go to all 178 folks who are taking the PERP. I am glad your personal financial situation enables you to take that leap. I bet every trip from now on if you announce you are PERPer, the beer is free!!

Free Bird

I know, going back a couple of pages I could almost see everyone lining up.

How some can try and justify the worst scope agreement in the industry amazes me.

Shall we summarize 70 seat jets:

AMR - 25
CAL - 0
SWA - 0

DELTA - 255

Oh boy, the 50 seaters are going away!!! Who cares!!!!!! 50 seaters won't replace the DC-9's and 88's. The economics won't allow it. And yet the union says rah rah rah, the 50 seaters are going away. As someone posted above a couple of pages back, the amount of DCI flying has actually increased.

Someone has to have a ballpark number of what percentage of DAL flying DCI did 10 years ago compared to today.