Boy.. and we all know how good Boeing is with THAT!..

Caveat: I am a BA shareholder, so I can badmouth them :D

At least you agree with the statement that they will never recover the money that we did. The central assertion was that if we just went into bankruptcy with our full contract, then things would have turned out better. I pointed out that that did not happen in the case of United and at least you seem to agree with that.

The majority of our claim was sold AFTER Parker's bid was rejected by the UCC. I do think it's funny that when events turn against us, it's all ALPA's fault, but when we succeed it's only luck. In your book, there is no way for us to ever succeed. It wasn't luck that we got such a large claim, it wasn't luck that we gave pilots enough information that the bulk of them decided to pre-sell their claim, it wasn't luck that we purposely tried to help the company come out of bankruptcy with a positive story about rebuilding employee relations. We did all of those things with a single purpose and that was to add value to our bankruptcy claim and get money into pilots' hands sooner rather than later. Sometimes you make your luck.

Does anybody have a good guess when the next AE might be coming out? Better yet, what might be on it.

Thanks

I'm not trying to be an apologist for Boeing, but it's not like Airbus hasn't had their own issues lately....
>The A-380 cost overruns, and lost orders due to production delays. i.e. FedEx, UPS, to name two
>The unbelievable cost & delivery issues w/ the A-400 turbo-prop (billed as the C-130 replacement). Practically every European country has given up on this A/C EVER being delivered.
Both companies, when they're at "A" game face is on, deliver a good product. Our A-330s are $ making machines. Ditto for the 777 & 747-400. I'm glad that our management plays one manufacturer against another. Keeps them on their toes, and motivated to deliver a superior product!
Chuck

Carl, I'm not sure if the NWA pilots signed the first offer or not, but here are my notes from DAL's first offer. Since you seem to know so much, could you tell me whether these terms were accepted?

Company 1113 proposal

*200 79 Seat Jets
*Rotation value reduced by minutes under
* 19.5% pay reduction – No raises for 5 years
*100 Seat Pay $88.93
*Delete International Pay
*No Claim
*No Note
*Per Diem $1.80 domestic $2.05 international
*Vacation 2.45 per day eliminate 5th and 6th weeks
*Release time of 15 minutes versus 30
*Crew for flights over 12 hours- 1 Captain and 3 first officers
*No Duty Period Average
*Duty Period Minimum of 3 hours
*No Duty Period Credit
*No Rotation Credit
*Rotation Guarantee: Eliminate guarantee for trips interrupted
shortened due to reroute or irops
*Sick Leave: 20 hours/year full pay, 60% for excess
*Furlough pay reductions
*Eliminate all furlough protections
*No provision to put MPPP money in pilots control if pension is terminated
*Long term disability only 2 years coverage unless completely disabled and
unable to hold any job.
*5 year duration

Latest guidance is a small one in late Jan and a larger one with a 365 day conversion in the second quarter 2011.

I had forgotten how BAD our BK contract negotiations actually WERE.

Reroute, that is enough to make anyone want to barf! Ugh....

Alfa,


Although I am new to this forum, I think your memory of NWA history is a little off esp with the NWA F/As events in Ch-11. Carl is correct in the fact the pilots took the first deal as there was a veiled pension threat termination driving the vote.


The F/As really held their ground on many issues. One of the biggest things they kept was the minimum day in which we lost. Quite frankly, that was huge as our NB schedules were terrible after Ch-11.


The F/As were under a tremendous amount of pressure to capitulate and they really delayed things during Ch-11. Management had already exterminated the AMFA mechs and the EMT was threatening the F/As with Replacement F/As ads in newspapers. There was also the ever present threat of outsourcing the Asia lines to Asia based, non-contract F/As.


The F/As delayed the contract so long that NWA management had to petition the CH-11 judge with their Executive Compensation Plan. The company couldn't wait any longer. The jist was DS would walk away with 26 million dollars and others would get 10 million etc.


The final F/A vote for the last contract offer was extremely close and nothing near crawling back to the company. NWA finally settled the AMFA strike (basically paid some sort of severance to the striking mechs who lost their jobs to the Replacement Mechs) and the company exited Ch-11.


The claim sale may have been in issue for the F/A to vote yes on the final contract but there is no doubt who was the thorn in the side to NWA management during CH-11. It was the F/As pure and simple.


This is how I remembered it all going down.....

I don't know how the pilot negotiations went, I was concentrating on our own problems. The flight attendants had their contract rejected by the bankruptcy judge. The judge allowed management to impose a contract which was the second failed TA (the one under AFA). The flight attendants were barred by injunction from striking. So they ended up with an imposed contract and no right to strike, that doesn't sound like a position of power to me.

They only settled on a deal at the very end in order to get a small bankruptcy claim. They also converted a lump sum meant for early retirement to other compensation. This was the only change to their imposed contract of any substance. The flight attendants were definitely a pain to management, but the question is what did they get from it. None of the deals varied by any significant degree from the first failed TA.

Clearly their compensation was less than what the Delta flight attendants got with no contract, especially when you consider the Delta F/A's got a much bigger share of the stock. So if your goal is to be a pain to management, the NWA F/A's succeeded. If your goal was to maximize your compensation, they came up short.

I don't know anything about AMFA and their strike, but that did not seem to work out well for them from the little I heard. Maybe you know something different. Certainly, it didn't take the mechanics very long to ditch AMFA and take the Delta non-contract deal after the merger closed.