JABDIP:

I'm sorry your W2 has declined. I want every DAL pilot's W2 to go up ... way up. But I will not accept pilots being less productive, flying less, or paying people to stay home. Our company simply can not do that and expect to compete.

I'd rather we stay lean and mean.

I am right there with you on scope, however I do not want to fly 25 outa 30 days to get that flying back. Somewhere there is a delicate balance bewteen QOL and getting flying back. Believe me, I definitely do not like outsourcing or the number of jobs that have been lost to the DCI carriers. I agree with your 2 points.

Neither of my two points require us giving anything up. We've given and given, and there are ways to make it financially viable to nudge/force the company into bringing the flying back. There certainly is a fine line, and I expect APA to find that line.

The massive pulldown of RJ's that is occurring is part of an opportunity that is ever widening to recapture.

I would have to say you are a long way from lean and mean compared to the lean and mean at NWA. Most of us(fNWA) are appauled at the way DAL throws money around. I flew more hours per day and did not have productivity sits in hotels around the world costing the company more money for extra rooms and perdieum that they do not need to spend. From what I have seen, just my opinion, NWA ran a more cost effective operation much of that coming from much better IT. The recent snow events in ATL and JFK/LGA attest to this, but after all if it was one thing we did know how to do was operate in a snow environment. I will give you that the 3 hour rule has complicated things and ATL has very limited snow/deice capability. Believe me there is room for major improvements here. What would you like to do work 12 days for 75 hours or 18 days for 75 hours. I want to go to work ,fly my tail off ,and then go home. It's call max pay for min time at work(resulting in less days away from home). If they want to sit my butt in a hotel room for 2 or 3 days not flying it needs to cost them dearly.:)

I think we are both after the same thing, a lean and mean company that will use me in a productive manner(fly me when I am at work).

How many flight engineers did we have back then? When I was hired we had a ton of 727's, and some L-10's.

I agree with your point about work rules causing massive job losses - they did, but totally disagree with your implication that job losses due to work rules dwarfs job losses due to outsourcing. Both have been bad for us.

I also disagree that we lost 777 jobs - since we now have more 777s and consequently more 777 pilots today.
Yes, we would have more 777 Pilots with better work rules but it is not totally correct to say we lost 777 jobs. How many less 777 pilots would we have now if we outsourced wide-body flying like UAL is attempting to do?


Job losses for any reason are bad for us as Pilots, but beyond our Pilot contract job losses through work rules are limited by FARs. The work rule caused job losses have been extensive - we agree here, but I feel they are basically behind us - I can only hope job losses due to outsourcing are also behind us.

Scoop

Agreed, we have given and given way too much!!!!!!!!!!! I hope you are right on the RJ pull down.

In two earlier posts you were complaining about "lost jobs". And that is what I addressed. We are in agreement. I hate the productivity sits, 30+ layovers. The IT isn't anywhere close to where it needs to be But I have faith in the company. They've paid $2B in debt this year, and put $1B in improvements and upgrading the product, and we're getting profit sharing. More importantly, the merger of our operations and the two companies has gone better than expected. Sure, there were some growing pains. We're past that. We're bigger, stronger, and more important, more profitable.

I spent the last two major snowstorms in the north with double layovers (twice) in MSP. I'm well aware of the North's de-icing/anti-icing capability. It took us 1.5 - 2 hours hours to de-ice/anti-ice and that was with the schedule gutted. You're never going to see a thousand flights or more being de-iced/anti-iced in Atlanta. There simply isn't enough money, man power, space, trucks, or de-icing fluid to do that.

As Anderson said this morning, when the big storms come rolling through, it is best to just clear the schedule, reset your planes and people, and try it again the next day. There's no need to kill someone trying to fly in that crap.

Wonder how many S/O jobs there were back then. That is an excellent point.

Well they are pulling a lot of Comair stuff out and i don't think they are replacing it right now. Good for the career, unless said career was at Comair

I have to agree that it is better to cancel rather than strand people in terminals and on the ramps. A good call and saw on the tube that the folks preferred the cancellations vs coming to the airport.