What you fail to see is that in this JV half of the growth above 21 for V Oz has to be ours. Was that requirement there prior to LOA 14? Is that not giving this pilot group block hrs if they choose to expand these markets? Is that not good for the Delta Pilots?

alfa's numbers are a result of two things.
Delta's 2 captain rule for ultra long range flights and the addition of a couple 777s that were on order that Delta couldn't cancel in bankruptcy.

Give me a break. Our international fleet hasn't grown and everybody knows it.

Anyone who has been around this property for a few years knows that alfaromeo is the zen master of statistical analysis and also misleading statistical analysis when it suits his purpose. On a moment's notice he can produce a pie chart or a bar graph to prove 2+2 does not = 4.

We are supposedly a global powerhouse yet we have no widebody jets on order. Most of our intl fleet is soon to be obsolete 767s. Our codeshare partners have hundreds on order and we continue making these agreements that provide them with their US connections. We continue to retreat from point to point service fron CONUS to overseas and concentrate on flying into their hubs.
They will soon be flying all the big iron and DALPA will be happy because those pax are filling our 717s.

Maybe DALPA has no legal way to stop them and we are just making the best of a bad situation but are you seriously trying to tell us that these JV agreements aren't lopsided in favor of our partners?

The international stuff. 737-900s replacing 757s. The shrinking seniority list. etc. etc.

We are being slowly downsized and the MEC is managing it very well.
Congratulations and thank you very much, but how about let's try to stop it instead.
Quit the unconditional cooperation. Just once when its appropriate to raise hell then let's raise hell!

That's a good point. The days of FAE are over and our wages should be adjusted accordingly. The big pay bump needs to be earlier in our career (senior FO's and junior Captains) so the money has time to work for us. All kinds of options, equipment banding, years of service pay (UPS) etc.

You goin? We fly you there. You been? We dun already flown up in there.

This goes back to the crux of why there is code sharing.

Using the premise that all Delta coded flying be done by Delta pilots, our network (meaning in this case flights flown by Delta pilots) would be substantially smaller than it is today.

Oz - USA is a strategic route for VA. It is a boutique route to DL. Boutique routes go away when they don't make money. Strategic routes are ones that you "have" to fly in order to stay in business. Under Delta's current strategy, an example of strategic routes would be transcons to business markets; even though they're overserved and have tremendous competition, we have to be in them in order to maintain coporate contracts that pay the freight on the rest of our network.

So without the codeshare, we pull out of Oz. We also lose the 100-200 pax daily that VA puts into our network and the LAX 737 or 757 daily departures shrink by 1. It works the opposite way too. We fly to Sidney. VA takes our pax to Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne. Lose those pax and our Sydney flight is no longer profitable, as they then go to Qantas.

My example is oversimplified, but let me know if it doesn't speak to your point.

Aren't they running these catergories fatter than normal due to fear of early retirements and the 747-400 training capacity issues?:confused:

http://cdn02.androidauthority.com/wp...-work-trip.jpg



My wife sent me on my last trip with a homemade video as well. Here's an APC exclusive re-creation of some of the Audio portion of that movie....


WIFE: "Hey, when are you going to clean up the guest room....my Mother's going to be here in two days to spend the holidays."

"...also, instead of watching football this Sunday, we need to go to the carpet store to get sample swatches for the living room"

"...and when are you going to take that dog of yours to the groomer, he looks like Cousin It having a bad hair day"

"By the way, I'm feeling really pre-menstrual today........

Somebody here is seriously psychic...

OSHA to Get Oversight of Flight-Attendant Work Conditions

OSHA to Get Oversight of Flight-Attendant Work Conditions- Bloomberg

I don't know if its the fact that the FAs have real rest areas, a pension, and now OSHA looking after them that makes me ask: *** happened to us?

Collectively, we've let things get way out of hand. I'm not making a gate PA unless it's in the contract. Period. I invite anyone else who is tired of being treated like doormats to join me... it's time to show mgmt, the other employees, and DALPA that we don't work for free, especially when our working conditions don't meet the standard of our colleagues.

No bucks... No Buck Rogers on the PA. And we want a BUNK in zee zpacecraft!

I saw that. While its a good sign, we need to see a lot more than that.

JB is not just taking BOS from DL (and AA/LCC) but they are taking the highest yields as well as corporate accounts as well as the over all market share. They are making huge inroads into MCO and have a large LA presence.

They are going into "near international" like Central and upper South America and will continue to grow there, possibly rapidly. While the A320 isn't a beast for cargo, it does good enough when you can undercut everyone else by a little bit and keep the belly full. They are doing that as well, and have deployed thinner markets/frequencies to ANC out of multipile cities.

And their presence in NYC may be in flux on particular ultra low yield routes (which JFK-PIT always was for them) but they are in their infancy implementing a massive pillage of legacy international traffic by code sharing/interlining with any and every flag carrier in existance. Pull 5 people off the Prague flight, 20 people off the Frankfurt flight, 15 people off the Dublin flight, etc. Airlines like DL will have to either let the yield buckets trickle down to the lower fare tiers or lose the pax.

While the (phony) EU economy is tanking, that is only part of the picture and I hope our leadership is prepared to severely punish them for their insolence. Sitting around culling capacity in perpetual pursuit for quarterly bonuses will reach critical mass soon (many think it has already) and that's when the lower CASM carriers tying into vast international markets out of key high density cities will have to be shown a severe economic lesson from the big players that actually have a long term plan. I think (and hope) we are one of them, but we'll see.

That said, JB as a separate brand is very likely for sale, regardless of if they want to be or not (although many signs point to them wanting to be). That would probably be a net win for airlines like DL, where the worst case is a merger/fragmentation/takeover by SWA. That would make the international poaching that much more painful for DL and others, but push over more than a few "low cost" dominos there to set DL up to do very well against them in the long run, just like SWA out of ATL (Clark Howard notwithstanding).

Its not about forcing the company to buy more 777's. They will likely do so anyway though, but probably in a way that requires less pilots, like 2 777's to replace 3 ER's, but anyway.

If the demand is there for a 50% increase for VA, then the demand is there. They apparently have no problem rounding up the AC for a 50% increase to one of the largest markets on earth. If the demand is there for that much route growth, we should get part of it. VA management wants the growth, and DL management only cares about running a virtual network with no capex, to the extent permittable by our PWA. DL pilot scope is Delta Air Lines as we know it. Period.