Good point.

The opposition was an unfunded grassroots effort.

 

There's no Christmas in June. Our language was written to be, at best, extremely naive and overly trusting at the expense of the entire pilot group by creating a seismic shift in power towards the company. By giving them unrestricted access to sick call harassment through poorly worded sophistry (whenever something is suspicious, yet suspicious being undefined) good luck to us ever trying to win a grievance on this. Oh and bonus, we just may have waived Federal privacy law for the entire group as well; at least until some "press to test" which hopefully some eventually will. I don't think collective bargaining can nullify HIPAA privacy rights by "forcing" you to sign away or divulge anything whatsoever under any newly created circumstance, but I guess we'll have to see.

For this to become an issue right out the gate, the second it could have, shows a clear path towards pilot pushing through classic sick call harasment which is one of the oldest tricks in the book. A worn out labor busting, pilot pushing playbook we were all told our friends on the other side of the table weren't calling plays from anymore.

This is a big deal and we've dug ourselves a huge hole with the pitiful language we agreed to. This wouldn't have gotten past a community college first year law school student yet it somehow got past the best our association had at its disposal?

Its great that we're now "fighting" the very problem we created and I hope we win. But what if we don't and now we're stuck with this?

 

That may or may not happen, but the TWA pilots are never going to see 1.7 Billion. You are correct in that ALPA would probably go away and be reborn with another alphabet group before 50,000 of us would be come indentured servants to compensate them for the equivalent of their seniority redo fantasy.

 

I feel your pain. Life long FO here. It's hard to watch the company grow out west using RJs in our very limited gate space while there is almost never a seat available on anything I fly. We had a massive head start on the merger parade and much of the success was due to pilot cooperation. Seems like we would have been able to capitalize and capture some market share. Unfortunately our company is addicted to capacity restraint. Whine mode off.

 

So all you were concerned about with your not one more seat and not one more pound stuff was the pencil whipped weight of the EMB-175 but not the quantity of EMB-175/CRJ-900s?

 

Agree, but more like 10 + years for some. Like you said it not so bad "stagnating" at the top. I realize that their are junior CAPTs stuck on reserve who are probably also frustrated, but they always have the option of bidding something else, whereas many pilots on the bottom of the list do not.

I was not trying to lay blame on DALPA, but I do think they went a little overboard in their zeal to sell the TA. I am not sure I understand the whole "sell-job" mentality and would actually prefer DALPA to take a more neutral point of view when presenting a TA. Kind of like - these are the good points, these are the bad points, and let the line pilots make up their own minds without the sell job.

My point was we may have done a good job getting our pay-rates up (compared to BK) but with all of our outsourcing many are seeing one step forward (increased pay) and two steps back (displacements to lower paying categories).


Scoop

 

In a company fully committed to capacity discipline while out competitors place record orders I often wonder how anyone thinks less total RJs but much larger ones benefits the profession in any way. I guess no one else sees 2x CRJ-900s with more range and frequency replacing some of our older narrow bodies.

Trends:
DCI gets bigger jets
Alaska codeshare
MX and S. America codeshares
Virginia Atlantic
KLM/Air France
....
And the -88s are conveniently last to get cockpit upgrades. Reality is once all these -900s are up and running I bet SLC and MSP follow the path of CVG, MEM and ANC. That's basically five bases in five years.
Now that we are all displaced at least one or two seats its time for another merger! I am sure this is coincidence...

 

[/I]How do you figure? Our language was NOT loosened; it was tightened up. Here's the old language:

1 F. 2


The Company may require that a pilot verify his sickness by providing, at the Company’s option, either:

• a doctor’s certificate, or
• other proof of illness.

Under normal conditions, the Company will not require verification unless the pilot has been absent for more than seven consecutive days.




And here's the new: Verification of sickness under Section 14 F. 2. is required when:

• a pilot has used more than 100 hours of unverified sick leave in a sick leave year, or
• a pilot has been absent on a single sick occurrence for 15 or more consecutive days.

When individual circumstances exist that give the Company a good faith basis to inquire regarding the medical reason for a pilot’s use of sick leave, such pilot may be required to state the nature of his illness in general terms to his Chief Pilot. Following such discussion, the Chief Pilot may:

• consider the current sick leave occurrence to be verified, or
• require verification of sickness from the pilot under Section 14 F. 2.

This has already been covered multiple places, but HIPAA absolutely DOES permit an employer to request some proof of your illness. Think about it -- the alternative is an employee just comes to work whenever he feels like it. HIPAA laws are primarily designed to protect you from having a doctor share your information without your permission to a 3rd party.

 

Originally I think 40 or so A320's were slated to retire in the coming years. The 737-900ER order wasn't just about 757's. Now all the sudden no one is talking about the 320's other than etherial rumors of life extension programs that may or may not materialize. In any case, the entire 737 order book could easily be pure replacement and even net shrinkage if we retire even a few older 88's. Yeah I know, glass and all that right? But until every last one of them gets it, they could easily retire a dozen or three that never make it to the magic glass factory to begin with.

The 717 does appear to be more growth than shrinkage at the mainline, even though the total network continues to shrink. How long can we keep shrinking, and what is our plan as we become more expensive as we shrink and the fantasy growth airlines (foreign and domestic) keep barfing countless hundreds of capacity aircraft into the system, while the only trick in our bag is to shrink to squeeze yields and quarter over quarter/YoY margins?

 

As 50-seaters leave DCI they will take approximately 11,000 or so seats with them. If you believe DAL really loved those 50 seaters and hated to give them up then you could say we reduced the 50 seaters by 11,000 or so seats.

But if you believe what is said to investors* then you have to believe they really wanted out of the 50 seaters. So I guess you could say DAL reduced 50 seaters by 11,000 seats and we facilitated that swap out by allowing the 76-seater seating capacity to grow by 45.8% and the overall jumbo RJ capacity to grow 29%.

Footnotes:
*RA : the 50-seat fleet reduction will be significantly accretive to our enterprise.

*EB: I don’t think customers want to fly 800, 900 miles on a 50-seater. Part of what we’re doing here is putting a better product in the market, better fuel efficiency, fewer airplanes in the air and our customers tell us they much prefer flying on mainline airplanes rather than 34-, 44-, and 50-seat airplanes.

Note: mainline > 50 seats.