Is there anybody else here (besides satchip) that thinks the debt is being paid down with the shareholder's money and not the money taken from pilots during BK, and continued to be taken until at least 2012?

Carl

So if someone disagrees with you or voices and alternative opinion they are

A.) Not a pilot/pretending to be a pilot
B.) Work for management
C.) Need to go back to Airliners.net
D.) Must be type rated on a xerox copier.
E.) must be pencil whipping paper somewhere in a cubicle.

Fantastic! :D

Yeah, 50% paycut and record profits don't seat well with me either. How many millions does it take to double every pilots pay? Altough I the tremendous losses in the past 10 years too.

I love my job and I am not a complainer, all we can do is negotiate a good contract in 2012-2013.
I am ready to strike too, but please lets be doers, not talkers.

--------
Carl;

Is this an official poll? Won't it give away our bargaining position?

^^^^^^^^^ Bingo

Only through a profitable company will we realize major LONG TERM wage gains. Extracting a 65% raise may make guys like Carl rich but they will only last till the next down turn. When that comes then I along with the other bottom third will be on the street, the top guys will be back to previous levels of compensation, and Carl and his ilk will be laughing all the way to the bank.

A restoration contract to 2004 C2K rates will take over 1,200 million or 1.2 billion. That is just for pay, not for work rules.

As a corporation sees this, they got major concessions from a ton of vendors during 1113C, the pilots were just one of them. Ugly but true.

So exactly how much does a 65% raise impact Delta's profitability now and in the long run? How big of a piece of the puzzle are we? I think it's quite a bit less than you think... but if you can show that the difference between our current pilot costs and restored pilot costs would break the company, I'd like to see your math.

Reducing debt, buying jets with cash etc, is good for us the "Joe" employee. If DAL paid off its entire debt it would free up 2 billion plus dollars a year in money that is spent on interest for financing that debt. Guess where that could go? You guessed it, employees, and a huge initiative to renew the airline. Everyone one wins.

All us want our money back, most us want our money back for more than two to three years, and understand the difference.

As Wimpy would ask, "Can I pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today?".

It's all about strategery.

If DAL makes 1.3 billion in profit this year, our pay restoration takes all of that and turns DAL in to a company that is barely in the black. If you look at the valuation of the C2K concessions and extrapolate them out (minus the DB plan) and then multiply it by the new pilot group you are at about 2.2 billion in year to reach total restoration.

Adding every profitable quarter together over the last decade and forgetting the ones where we lost billions still does not equate to 2.2 billion in profit.

Now to save you from the next question of whether or not DAL needs to be profitable to get a pay raise I will state this. Our costs like every other costs that hits a balance sheet need to be inline with the rest of the industry or the "cost cutters" in management will look at ways to cut them to make them more in line with the competitors.

Find a way to get pilot pay equal industry wide and you make pilot costs, a fix cost and not a variable cost. Given every pilot association's action in the 1113C era we all agreed that we were in fact a variable cost.

No one argues that work needs to be done, it is just "how" we want the work done.