Mem9guy,

Lee Moak made a similar observation that the former RJ pilots were scope obsessed.

Thanks for noticing. :)

Regards,
Bar

I agree Scoop. There are 147 guys furloughed from CAL, & I betcha their reserves get their tails flown off this summer. Back in the summer of 2008 the 737 reserve FOs @ CAL were flying 90+ hours a month!!!! That's just silly, & I personally want no part of that!

Same went for the UAL pilots. I'll admit that over 80 hour pay was nice, but I'm not willing to fly my butt off to help UNDERSTAFF an airline. Guys are yelling they want C2K rates back, but how about the work rules/staffing formulas? As a combined group we barely exceed the size of the former stand alone DAL pilot group. That's a lot of jobs lost, & a lot more work. :(

Bar, in re your previous post about job trends. How many of those new jobs or positive motion is due to government jobs? Real private sector unemployment is around 16% while government employment is around 2-3%. I agree with your correlation to our future hinges on the employment numbers, I just don't see it improving soon.

Hope I'm wrong...

This past summer, 88 and 73 guys were flying in the mid-80s each month. I didn't put in for a single slip and was getting 84 hours or so routinely.

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Satch;

4Q GDP growth was adjusted downward significantly from the initially reported 5.7% because the growth was including Goobermint job growth and stimulus effect. Some adjustments have been as low as .3% growth total. IOW our children paid for good 4Q numbers.

I agree with your assesment about employment in the private sector. It takes a robust private secor to fund a decent public sector, not vice versa.

When the talking heads say "jobless recovery" I hear no recovery. I hope I am just a jaded naysayer.

Scambo

Man, I leave for 3 days and now have 5 threads to catch up with! Clamp is overwhelmed.

This one's for you dfw wannabe's. We obviously got the two nwa gates. We are getting one airtran gate. Supposed to get a second gate from airtran but that still hasn't happened yet. We are getting closer to acl's mythical 10 gates in dfw. Source-dfw ops on an awesome quickturn.

An awesome quick turn, plus rumors? You had the A-team!

http://cribbster.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/a-team.jpg

You do know that you can turn down any trip that would put you over the authorized line value? Its max is 82.

The data does not break out to discriminate between public and private sector openings. However, for correlation to Delta it probably does not matter. The government buys a lot of tickets and pays a lot for them. Government workers are these days more likely than not to be higher paid than private sector employees and most get much more generous leave and vacation.

Of course deficit spending hurts the US, but that's really another topic.

From the capacity numbers I've crunched, Delta and NWA have been lagging the us GDP growth by 7% to 10%. In other words during periods of 5% GDP growth, Delta was still shrinking by 5% and during a 5% GDP recession, NWA pulled down capacity something near 20%. It is likely the entire industry has been consolidating, but both NWA and DAL have been the "incredible shrinking airline" for a decade.

I based my employment quest on a belief that emergence from bankruptcy would change that trajectory. Unfortunately the numbers don't tell me much changed in the net result. An airline CEO once said, in this business you are either comfortably making mistakes, or scared to death and working with your hair on fire. He said the best results came when they were scared to death. Don't know about NWA, but at Delta it does not seem like there has been much calm between the storms for the last ten years.

When I have the time looking at the variance between DAL, NWA and the rest of the industry would be interesting. For one thing, the capacity levels between DAL and DCI were always divergent until the last two years. Now they move together.