80ktsClamp

320 guys had a gravy train due to poor staffing this year. I made 40 grand more than last year riding that!

Here's to sailingfun learning how to interpret and extrapolate facts better in the new year!

Happy new year to all my deltoid friends!

FIIGMO

Damn anywhere north of 150k would be a happy new year!!

But to all my APC friends, frenamies and enemies!

We have our differences and we have our opinions, but to all my friends at Delta and to a great group of professionals in the business! Denny, Scoop, Hockey, 80, FTB, T, Carl, Ferd, Buzz, Sail and especially Alfa (in our thoughts and prayers)! Let's stay together and hope for a happy, healthy (I'm gonna go broke) and prosperous new year!

FIIG

sailingfun

It all comes down to how much you want to work. There are many ways to pump up your average. SWA pilots had some good years with lots of 1.5 pay. They are not seeing that much now. Delta has the same cycles and there can be big differences between equipment. One other thing is pilots who want to downplay their earnings often quote their w2 number. Their actual earnings are substantially higher then that. In my case its a 30k difference. The one fact no one other then some pilots at Delta want to argue is that Delta's overall pilots costs are the highest in the industry.
The other fact is no other airline union has made the kind of gains we have over the last 6 years. Given the shackles the RLA imposes on us and the backlog at the NMB we have done better then I expected.
SWA as a union has not done a single thing other then negotiate a payrate back in 2001 that was 15 percent below the Delta rate and then coast on managements decision on fuel hedges and their airlines strong financial position.
What I find really strange is pilots who want a tougher union at Delta using SWA as a example. Over the last 30 years their has not been a more management friendly union then SWAPA.
One last small point. We could all make more money at Delta if we eliminated all caps as SWA does. Well I should not say all. The pilots who got furloughed and sent to the street would make a lot less.

sailingfun

[QUOTE=Carl Spackler;1550371]You strike me as a guy who either inherited a ton of money or came to it through some other means. So I'm betting your Delta income is beer money. That's why I call it a hobby job for you.

Close Carl, First person in my family to ever graduate from college. Put myself though school. No family money, no inheritance, nothing on my wifes side either although she did have 2000 dollars in the bank when we got married which was 3200 more then I had when you added in my debt.

forgot to bid

Jay5150

Sailing,

Just stop, please.

We are not as stupid as management or, as it seems, you, would have us believe. You can't compare our average pilot cost to SWA. It's not an apples to apples comparison. You know that. We have, what? 300+ airplanes larger than the 737. 150+ of them are wide-bodies. Of course our pilot costs are higher than theirs. Guess what, our costs are also higher than that of Spirit, Allegiant, JB on and on and on.

Compare our 737 pilot costs to their 737 pilot costs. They blow us outta the water. All of us have friends over there. We know what they make at the end of the year vs. how much they worked. Forget the bs MIT data. Talk to a 73 guy.

And what if we were on par, cost wise (which we are most definitely not)? Should we look at everybody who flies a 737 and tie our pay to that? Bull Feces. If everybody were generating the same profit then, maybe.....but they are not. We outpaced the industry in profits this year by a nearly 2-1 margin. Just because the old UsAir's 12 year captain rate on the 73 was what? 80 bucks an hour less than ours, must we then bargain down to them. If they are making money and we are not, then maybe. Certainly not when we made $2B.

I didn't really want to be a DPA guy. I would rather fix ALPA. But this kind of misdirection and really, outright lies, has made it impossible not to. I have intimate knowledge of the APA, lets just say I married into it, and they have their warts, for sure. They have been bitten, no doubt, but they've also showed fortitude when it counted and will come out of their BK much better than most, certainly us. (I've seen the specific numbers to prove it) I'm all for a constructive relationship, but ours has been decidedly one-sided. I mean for cripe's sake, how much money does DAL have to make before we can be on par with a 737 only airline. (which we are not, so please don't shovel that crap again.)

I honestly mean that respectively, though I'm sure it doesn't seem so but....


C'mon man.

Jay5150

Also, happy New Year.

Am I the first post of 2014?

Quint

Is that you??!!

If so, you're getting smooched WAY above your pay-grade.

BigGuns

OMG Sailling, enough you are totally delusional.... You might live a comfortable, eutopicistic life in Peachtree City, but your facts are misleading. Delta pilots can easy make more than SWA pilots, but only if they scr3wed themselves out of days off for GS and IAs! The SWA pilots I know can make 85+ credit hours a month on a line with no OT and average 2 days off more. 2 days a month adds up to almost 1 month a year more time off.

Bottom line is SWA pilots get more time off and make more $ because they have better productivity than us! Mainly because their management didn't choose to operate 5 categories of aircraft domesticly!

Timbo

When you compare "Pilot Costs" between one airline that only operates one fleet, vs. an airline that operates every airframe ever built, well...it's apples and oranges, no way to make a real comparison except to compare our 737 Pilot Costs to SWA's.

So...who decided to buy every airframe ever built and drive the pilot costs up in the first place?

Was that the pilot's, or a Management decision.