Originally Posted by gloopy (Post 1369468)

I hope that's looked in to. Leaving people with plenty of seats just to bang out a prescious D-0 is asinine. Those are your people. They deal with tens or hundreds of thousands of your customers for decades. Snubbing them when they want to grab a sample of the product they are responsibile for dishing out is one of the most short sighted negative ROI policy manual types of things we can do. Best case an entire day of their vacation ruined.

Now, if that flight went out *exactly* at max weight, which just so happened to be with all the revs and zero non revs, then fine, but we all know the odds of that are pretty slim. This really needs to be looked in to.

Originally Posted by Bucking Bar (Post 1369518)

Slowplay PM'd reminders to everyone.

Originally Posted by hockeypilot44 (Post 1369548)

A lot of times, there is more cargo in weight than the plane can take. Once all the revenue passengers are on, they load the cargo up to the max aircraft weight for the flight. It happens more than you realize on long haul flights. There is zero chance of getting on as a non-rev when this happens.

Originally Posted by bluejuice71 (Post 1369482)

The March crew resources update clearly states that "the March 2013 bid should be our final cleanup before entering into the more frequent bid phase." So going forward there hopefully will not be anymore displacements.

Originally Posted by boog123 (Post 1369563)

"Clearly States?" Really?

Originally Posted by johnso29 (Post 1369571)

Yes. Really. Did you read the newsletter? The exact words are this:

The March 2013 bid should be our final clean-up before entering into the more frequent bid phase.

Originally Posted by sailingfun (Post 1369337)

This is a example of how wrong the forum gets things. The bid that just closed in nov replaced those ER pilots in fact it replaced almost every single one. Around 94 awards were made. Add in the additional awards now and we may have added seats. The award is still available on delta net. The aug bid replaced many of the 747 captains who retired. The 330 was not back filled because of the lie flat mods.

Originally Posted by bluejuice71 (Post 1369476)

With regards to shrinking any farther I can tell you from In Command a couple of weeks ago, Ed Bastian stated that Delta is planning on hiring 8,000 pilots in the next 10 years. Obviously some of this is for expected attrition and the rest is for expected growth. Even Wall Street doesn't expect us to continue the capacity constraint we've shown for the last several years. At some point if we don't grow, it will negatively affect our stock price.

Originally Posted by sailingfun (Post 1369340)

Read the Dec crew planning letter about this bid.

e current unknown factor is the DC9. We did not expect the DC9 to remain in service into 2013, and as a result, the DC9 training department has been greatly reduced. With this reduction, we can now train only two DC9 crews a month. If a large number of DC9 pilots bid off the equipment on the October and early 2013 AE bids, we will be challenged to backfill those pilots in order to meet the summer DC9 flying demand. If DC9 pilots remain on the equipment, the situation is not as critical. Unfortunately, we are not very good at predicting pilot bidding behavior. The October 2012 bid has DC9 openings so we can create a buffer in the event a large number of DC9 pilots do bid off. The early 2013 bid may have DC9 openings as well depending on the number of DC9 pilots bidding off on the October bid.