Okay, minor revision to your overall point, but it hurts your credibility. I was hired at TWA in 1989. For the first 5 years, I flew 727 F/E with mostly Captains that were hired in the 1960's. I know that group well. The guys who were hired in the mid-1960's did pretty well and upgraded quickly. The guys who were hired in 1969 were furloughed several times and it took them 15-17 years (yes, you heard that right) to get off the engineer panel! The 70's was a time of horrible stagnation at TWA. Your claim that it was "the place to be in the 70's" is not correct.

 

Fine. Thanks for the correction, but I stand by the overall gist of my post, that everybody gets their turn in the barrel. What was that old saying about those that ignore history? But I guess SWAPA has it all figured out.. just like a certain resident of Washington DC has socialism all figured out....

 

I don't get it.

 

As with everything, we shall see. But, I just don't see it, which of course means nothing.

But, it is an airline that just merged with tons of pilots who lost lots of seniority who will be looking to upgrade the first chance they get. I think the entire pilot group is pretty young, too. Finally, where are they going to expand? Atlanta? New York? Hawaii ?

I just see SWA doing a lot of reactionary things which leads me to believe they are running out of options. I'm not suggesting they are about to go belly up or anything, I'm just saying that maybe their growth is starting to slow.

 

I have no idea whether it saves us money or not. I do find it interesting that when you get an RTA message and you plug the crossing time into the box that the throttles will go to .83 for 10 minutes to try and make that time.. fuel flow goes yee haw, and it would seem that all those savings go out the tailpipe. But Mongo only pawn, in game of life.

 

I kinda agree with the gist of your post, but then again I kinda don't agree. The point you make that I don't think you are intending to make is that this whole thing is really a crap shoot. It doesn't matter which airline you go with, any of them could be tomorrow's nightmare for your career... or not. Roll the dice and take your chances. You have little to no control over it. All you can do is make the best decision possible with the information you have today. Anyone who thinks they can predict what's going to happen in the future... whether it's an airline, the economy, the price of gold, whatever... is fooling themselves. The only airline that has consistently been a great place to be in terms of a good balance between advancement and compensation over a really long period of time is SWA. Will it be that way going forward? Doesn't really look like it with the Air Tran purchase. But who knows?

 

Blue: Exactly my point. hockey thinks that chasing the money to SWA will put him in a better position. Personally, I think he is blinded by the glint of sunshine off his colleagues shiny new car, and that fuels his jealousy. (Again, I think that is incredibly sad on his part)

Red: I disagree. And I am not going to argue the point here. It is my opinion, and we will see in a few years who is correct. I do know this... in the merger world, 1+1 does not = 2. Never has.. never will.

 

If that's not the point ts is trying to make, I'll do it.

Ask the "over 60" 727 s/o I flew with in 1998 who left American in the 60's to go to Braniff. If he had stayed at AMR, he said he would have retired #1. But, he said at the time leaving American to go to Braniff was a no brainier.

When I got hired in 1995, United was the place to go. People were leaving everywhere to go to United for years. Many of those pilots are still furloughed.

I'm sure there are tons of stories out there just like that that involve different airlines.

 

eeeeeeeee yup^^^^^^^

 

I think he's just looking at the FACT that the average F/O at SWA is making over $140K (more than I made as a Captain last year!) and not working any more days than the average F/O at Delta. Will that disparity continue into the future? Who knows? But I do know that GK's letter indicated he was interested in a "productivity" solution and not pay cuts. So what if they have to work an average of 13 to 14 days instead of the 12 days they average now? And with us... we currently have a union that's acting as if our contract is a new baseline from which to negotiate traditional improvements. Unless our line pilots wake up and force a change (whether that's DPA or somehow forcing ALPA to change), it's not looking very promising that we're going to significantly close that gap between current Delta pay and current SWA pay.

Man, aren't we all painfully aware of that!

I hope you weren't one of those guys that thought we had to do a merger to be "too big to fail and have a seat at the bailout table." That proved to be a bunch of crap. And now we're all stuck with a shrinking airline and backwards movement.