acl65pilot

Yep, the only reason it is not published is because per the PWA any award published prior to the announcement or SOC has to be divided up between the premerger groups. There really is no benefit of announcing SOC today or tomorrow so they will wait and we will wait and see the results when it is announced. It may be the 31st if they announce it early enough. Either way before the end of the week you will know your fate.

acl65pilot

What you did not get your invite?

944Turbo

How junior do you guys think MSP 88B will go via a VD? I'm around 11500 on the list. Should have bid A! Yeah right....

The wife and kids are excited about a new adventure outside of the ATL!

acl65pilot

I think you should have bid A. I bought a double breasted black winter coat today after I saw my results (Just kidding)




About seeing the results that is.........

JobHopper

I sure did! It started out "Pack your bags and come to New York..."

bigdaddie

Look back about 1500 pages and you will see where I was stating the same: some things really are free! But since it was the dark ages then, I guess ppl were a bit pessimistic. The things that are nearly "no cost" to the company should be on that list that I call the "we will get" list. The other things such as pay and retirement are the items that we will negotiate.

Now that the pilot pool will be spread a bit more around the system, I thinks there will be a more broad interest in the contractual improvements. I used to bid reserve pre BK and I must say my golf handicap was the lowest ever. Beyond that however, I was available and willing to help out when needed. I say screw SC and let GS take over!

"Bid what you want and want what you bid" ya - all!

BD

acl65pilot

I am in NYC and my God is it cold.

acl65pilot

To late to Bid anything. Now it is you will get what you bid or did not bid and like it!

alfaromeo

Well there are two issues here. First, is do I think we need to get contractual improvements, and the answer is yes. I think I pointed out in my posts that I consider it a given that we will increase our contractual costs in our next Section 6. The problem is that that increase will end up being some number of dollars and it will be fixed. That fixed amount will go to whatever the MEC (representing the pilots) deems are the priorities. If it is reserve then fine. As long as everyone knows the costs. There is a bucket of money to spread around and at some point the bucket runs out. If you use your bucket to increase reserve costs, there will be less left to increase pay, vacation or whatever and you can't pretend that is not true. It doesn't matter how much pay cuts you have taken, a finite amount of dollars is a finite amount, period.

The second issue is that in the short term, we have a contract with a defined cost structure going into the future. If we want to significantly increase the costs in one section of the contract, the company will demand some sort or trade to balance those costs OR they will have to eat the increased costs. Almost as soon as we exited bankruptcy, we have signed a series of agreements that have increased costs for the company, not significantly, but to a measurable amount. Most of these agreements gave the company some operational flexibility that could allow them increase revenue or decrease costs in some other way. For instance, we moved the equator 3 degrees south (that's a joke) so that 737's could go to Quito and in exchange we got 737-700 pay moved up to 737-800 pay. That was a trade. We obtained several other improvements along these lines.

If we are going to get mid-contract improvements that are significant, then we will have to trade something in return, otherwise why would the company do it. Maybe if the JAL deal goes through, we can leverage our cooperation in a Joint Venture for some contract improvements. Maybe some other issue will arise that calls for a trade. Despite all of the cuts that have occurred (and I remind you that they all happened to me the same as you, I don't know, you might not have been around for all of them) the idea that you can walk in and demand mid-contract improvements just because we took cuts in the past is probably wishful thinking. Remember, after 9-11, the company started asking for contract relief in early 2002. The deal was completed in late 2004 and only when the company was on the courthouse steps getting ready to file Chapter 11. We took three pay raises in the meantime. It does work both ways.

So the answer is yes I am quite upset that our contract has been hit hard by the collapse of the industry. Yes, I want more money. Yes, I think we deserve more money. But yes, I realize that every section of the contract is a trade in value against every other section. While I want our contract costs to go up, in the end it will be a FIXED NUMBER that can be spent on many different things, but not all things at once.

This is a business and we have to realize that in business there is no such thing as cosmic justice. We have a record second to none in navigating through these hard times. In the last five years we have retained and added more value to our contract than any other pilot group facing similar circumstances. That is the mindset that the current ALPA leadership team has shown.

You can't sit around and feel sorry for the past you keep having to work the future. I don't think we have gone more than six months at any time since bankruptcy exit where we haven't put more value into our contract. We created hundreds of millions of value out of this merger, something that has never been done before, something that was invented whole hog by the current Delta union leadership. Any normal person would recognize that accomplishment and realize that in a finite world with very real limits, we have pushed those limits harder than any other pilot group. Look at United, look at US Air and tell me what you see there.

NuGuy

Heyas,

A lot of the angst with regards to reserve is its commutability, or lack therof...With so many people seeming worried about commuting, let alone to commuting to reserve, we might want to look at other ideas.

Of course, at NWA, if you were anywhere above the most bottom DC-9 FO, you could RELIABLY avoid reserve simply by making sure you bid any B (block) position versus any R (reserve) position.

If you WERE a blockholder, but didn't get enough flying for a full schedule, you got to sit what we called "time available"(TA), which was really reserve. It was an available period of 0700-1500 for a number of days which was calculated by how much credit you needed to get to the blockholder guarantee.

But here was the cool part...you could sit it in base or sit at home. If you sat a base you got a higher guarantee than if you sat at home. But if you sat at home, well, you were at home.

When you sat TA at base, you were pretty much the first ones to get called out except for the TA at home folks. It was pretty much the same as regular reserve, except you worked fewer days and had a limited call out period.

Here's the deal on the sitting at home part. You were the VERY first to get a trip. There wasn't any set minimum time to report, you were expected to make every attempt to make your trip. BUT scheduling understood that you were coming from home, and that you might not make a 0500 report the next day if they called you at 1459, depending on loads and what not. Sometimes, if they really needed you, they'd space positive you up to base. If not, they'd bypass you. If they did give you a reasonable amount of time, but you blew the commute, it was sorta no-harm, but they could require you to sit the rest of your TA days in base (a huge motivator to make your commute).

I've sat a LOT of TA at home, and I never got a call out that was less than 18 hours to report.

So while TA was used in sort of a limited fashion, it's structure COULD be transplanted to a sort of Ultra Long Call reserve (ULC). There are a couple of problems with using it as a "at large" solution.

First, sitting reserve at home, versus at base is obviously desirable. So you want to respect seniority and make it biddable. BUT, with such a long call out, what would prevent local types from bidding it out of sheer convienence? Also, with such a long call out period, you might infringe on the trip filling process with white slips/green slips/whatnot by assigning trips 18 hours out to what are essentially reserve pilots.

The first problem could be solved by making a ULC line worth less than a regular reserve line. Say 63 hours versus 70. The trip filling issue could be solved with contractual changes, but that would require the political will to do so.

It was the negotiating priority of the NWA MEC to maximize the number of blockholders. Thus most of the available negotiating capital went towards that effort, and as a result, reserve really sucked. But there were ROCK solid ways to avoid reserve, unless you were at the very bottom, so commutability was never an issue. Now with the number of people starting to seriously face commuting to reserve, we might need some out of the box thinking to preserve some kind of QoL.

Nu