Expressjet pilots just voted down their TA. Eagle decided not even to release it to their pilots. ALPA's own data reflected a near hiring shortage in 2007 before the financial crisis pushed that off until now.

Those data points converge, just as Captain Lee Moak says, at a shortage in pay and working conditions.

You and I think strategically. Was it an accidental whim that resulted in our jobs here at Delta, or did we train, prepare, invest our time and money into what we figured would be a good career? At that time the model was pretty obvious. At the beginning of this Century it became apparent that model was pretty obviously broken. I was part of maybe 5% who made it out of the interview pool ... those are pretty slim odds for a student picking a career with a $100,000 buy in.

Management is already investigating a sort of ab-inito, multi crew license proposal. Management will solve the math problem. They will solve it with us, or without us. It has always been your preference to be engaged.

Sharpen your pencil Sir. I'll be glad to assist. Politically, this is all win for ALPA and ALPA's leadership. I do not know if Captain Moak needs the express pilots to win, but this would gain their support.

 

Almost certainly wrong. For each of the last 7 years, 4,000+ CFI certificates were issued. A 98% decrease in one year seems unlikely.

http://www.faa.gov/data_research/avi...Air17-2012.xls

2013 data hasn't been released yet.

 

Could be, I suppose. The MEC is meeting this week, so we'll know soon enough if there's been a deal.

Good to hear.

 

Are you suggesting that ALPA act proactively? About 15 years too late!

Seriously, though, I agree that if we don't step up, someone else will (A4A). I've said before that we should take it a step even further... take over licensure... just like the AMA does with Doctors and the ABA does for Attorneys. "Solve" the FAA problem and the A4A problem with our own in-house solution. That would go a long way towards beating back the foreign threat too, and consolidate political power in the hands of pilots...

 

Your file won't download. I guess he could have been blowing smoke up our.....

 

Bar, this is what we were trying to do by supporting the Comair pilots during their strike!!...closing the gap between mainline and DCI..then JC and Ford formed the RJDC to sue for DOH throughout the whole mainline list, held the DL furloughees hostage after 9/11, and rebuked any offer from DALPA to help furloughed ALPA pilots in return for FUTURE hiring advantages with mainline for ALPA pilots, basically quashing any sense of UNITY between DCI and mainline.

What's to prevent the same thing from happening when senior RJ captains at DCI realize they can just sue to place themselves ahead of you after we spend a huge amount of negotiating capital with management to bring all of DCI under the mainline umbrella? Unity goes both ways..

I'd like to believe that the market forces and pilot shortage will facilitate our vision, but I'm afraid of a few disgruntled pilots with lawyers that will take us back to the Comair fiasco.

(By the way..responded to your previous post on the previous page, but can't seem to type fast enough to keep up with you guys!)

 

On reserve at ASA, I see the gamut of trips that come up for the larger RJs. There are some 8 or 10 leg 4 days worth 24+, but more common are 12-14 leg 4 days worth 20ish. And of course there is some 5 leg day, low credit junk to go around too. That is all way better then the 50 seat scheds, there I saw 24 and 26 leg 4 days - 7/6/6/5!! Those were rough trips- generally less than 1hr of credit per leg, plenty of airport appreciation and lots of <10hr overnights. Its been a little while since I flew that plane and I think 117 and mainline doing some of the CHA/AGS/BHM etc turns cut down some of the ugliness. Longest leg is about 1400nm, but over 1000 is not that common. Stage length seems to make a huge difference on QOL.....


Unfortunately, the 9E capitulation was facilitated by DL and DALPA, by way of the preferential interview. The "C-scale" was sold to great effect by the carrot of a short-cut to a DL seniority # (And the play was repeated even more effectively over at PSA). It would be helpful if the carrots could be offered to those who do the right thing (ie, refusing to accept substandard living conditions), instead of those who are undermining your long term objectives. While there is a percentage at the top of our list who are content where they are with decent pay and QOL; most of us are grinding it out weekly and keeping our noses clean in hopes of getting the chance to be junior on the 88 or 717 someday.



I understand your bitterness, and I do not discount the hardship it caused, but I think your perspective is colored by your own experience. You have said that the RJ pilots received a "windfall". A few benefited, a little. Most got a meh job for crap pay with a crap schedule at a crappy company. Quite a few ended up getting furloughed from or losing their bottom feeding jobs. Most of us had few, if any other options at the time. I had a couple thousand hrs and an ATP when I got hired into the RJ (around the time DL sold us off), and to get to DL/NW/CAL/UAL/AMR/LLC/AT/SW, one needed 121 PIC time on his/her resume. Should I have gone to Great Lakes or CommutAir instead of ASA? Should I have chosen even poorer pay and QOL on my journey to a mainline seniority #? Perhaps, the conventional wisdom now seems to be that new pilots should go to the outfit with the worst pay and work rules because turnover is high and a quick upgrade will get you to mainline fastest. Right now, some of the worst companies to work for are the ones filling classes. That is the dynamic in place, because there is a rising level of desperation among regional pilots. The DL furloughs sucked, one of my commuting buddies was in that group. The givebacks and the pension losses sucked. And yes, there may have been some short term turnabout with RJ pilots benefiting at your loss. But in the long-term, anyone with a DL # is still doing better than any RJ pilot out there. And RJ pilots cannot do much beyond what they are now, voting down concessionary TA's, applying for better jobs and, sometimes voting with their feet and just leaving the industry. You as a Delta Airlines Pilot have the say on what your scope is in the next contract. And yes, "a few (seriously misguided) disgruntled pilots with lawyers" can make problems, but don't let a few arshlochs being arshlochs keep you from doing the right thing. And when you (DL pilots) decide on how to deal with this thing, let us know. Plenty of us playing the long game who would like to help, through official channels or otherwise.


Bucking Bar: I am continually impressed by your insight and profoundly ethical sense of decency in most everything you post about. You might just be the smartest guy in the room.

 

CGfalconHerc,

This is where you and I get crossed up. JC and Ford did not form the RJDC. They were on opposing sides of the spectrum. Further, no offer of help was ever refused by the RJDC or Dan Ford. In fact, Dan Ford told JC Lawson his attempt at leveraging the furloughees was wrong and would not work. Dan Ford was not a Status Rep, he was a line pilot. He did not represent anyone, except himself. JC Lawson was an ALPA EVP. His antipathy towards Dan Ford was not unlike our MEC's view of the DPA leadership.

I've not gotten into the details of how I would propose extending our list down, but, Pan Am's example with Ransome (Pan Am Express) serves as one example which could be looked at. Since pilots like to bid (and do not like to be forced) I would propose to let the express guys keep their number within their express system. There would also be a system seniority number given which would be the result of the Delta list + (express guys by DOH). The mainline bids would run off the system seniority number. Eventually, when a guy could hold a mainline job, he could bid up. Conversely if there were displacements, they would use the system seniority number in the same fashion. In plain terms, such a system would allow pilots to bid for what they wanted. (by the way, I stole that idea lock, stock and barrel from Dan Ford who you claim demanded DOH on our list ...)

The "RJ Defense Coalition" gained it's name as a result of the Contract 2000 scope metrics which did not work from inception. To explain; the ratio of mainline to RJ flying was basically 1/3 to 2/3. With 500+ new RJ's coming from a prior order, the Delta fleet would have had to grown by 1,500+ to keep up. It seemed everyone on the express side of the house knew contract 2000 could not function as designed without major changes. The RJ guys figured "their" airplane order was going to get cancelled so that Delta could remain in compliance. Thus the name ... the RJ Defense Coalition.

They had hoped to secure an ally, and funding, from Bombardier. Bombardier's response is that Delta was the customer and Delta was taking the airplanes (insert sound of slammed door).

If course we know the history. Almost immediately (within 6 months) Contract 2000's scope provisions began to fail and ALPA always provided scope relaxation in time to accept the deliveries of airplanes scheduled all the way back with the 1999 order.

IMHO there have been times we have really failed to do our homework. We are on the edge of another opportunity where we need to do our homework and be prepared. This problem will be solved, as they all are. ALPA simply has the choice of whether to participate on the front end (as we did with great success in Delta's merger history), or if we choose to be reactionary and try to leverage something from the changes being imposed on us (as we did following Contract 2000).

Seems to me our leadership has a well developed skill set in this area. I hope they will engage.

 

I've always posted about this on here. The solution is to turn in your DPA card. Yeah, the DPA sucks, but it can be fixed, ALPA can not.

 

Are you kidding?

DPA doesn't suck, it simply doesn't exist. Placing your hopes behind a non-entity is not a strategy. It is our responsibility to fix what we have - NOT run away from a mess and hope that something, anything, even nothing (in the case of DPA) will be better.