BS! You are totally out of touch with reality if you think $60K-$100K jobs are a dime a dozen out there. You would be very hard pressed to find a $75K+ year job that you are qualified for if you were to hit the street job hunting.

You know these quarterly recurrents are pretty good but I get confused on the meteorology part.

This might have something to do with being ATLM88, but when it talks about "mountain wave", what is a "mountain"?

I think "mountains" are way west of the Mississippi River....out there in the thin air where the -88 demons live. Don't go...

It's that bump you fly by coming from DIRTY while being vectored for 26R, after your BDL overnight!

Emirates, etc ...

Exactly true....

Mountains?

Take a look at the last few 10-K. Let me know what Delta's capex is vs our depreciation. I think you'll find that your hedge fund manager friend is wrong.

Delta may not be making investments where you want them to, but they are investing in the company. Our 2011 metrics are toward the top of the pax industry (RASM, Margin, costs), and that's a big turnaround from 2009/2010.

At the road show didn't they say we were 200 pilots overstuffed? So that's 1-2% over? Where's the panic button? Can i go back to the survey and say 0% pay raise for C2012 and I'll celebrate anything above that, like 5% over the life of the contract!



I said overstaffed but got tired of fighting with iPhone on what I really meant.

We invested $1.5 billion in capital expenditures in 2011. We took $1.5 billion in depreciation in 2011. Sounds to me like not growing or not shrinking. Capex has nothing to do with profits as it does not show up in operating expenses, it only shows on the Cash Flow statement. There was a reason we tried to explain airline finances to pilots last year. We weren't trying to lower expectations, we wanted you to understand this stuff and be able to make reasoned and not emotional judgements.

I don't know what this hedge fund manager said, if you posted it somewhere back I missed it. Delta is now generating excellent cash flow. In 2009 they used the cash flow mainly to fund merger expenses. In 2010-12 they will use the cash flow mainly to de-lever the airline and make us more immune to external events (like tsunami, 9/11, wars, etc.) and allow the airline to thrive in good AND bad times. In 2013 and beyond they will use that cash to fund fleet renewal with 737-900's and then next-generation aircraft. This is not liquidation. This is a sound business plan that will pay enormous benefits to your future.

The airline business has been in a negative stability loop in the last 20 years. The highs went higher and the lows went lower. 2003-2005 pretty much signaled that something had to change. Instead of making the business a high risk gamble, through consolidation and better balance sheet management, Delta is de-risking our business and producing a model that can generate consistent profits, which by the way will fund contract improvements. Part of this new rationality will be the lack of the explosive growth followed by furlough models we have seen.