When have I EVER said that I accept any of this? EVER...

I know you. I have actually met you before on a couple of occasions. Like most of us on here, our forum personas are vastly different than the ones we live day to day.

Your constant mantra about giving up too easily is purely emotion based, neither you nor I nor anybody on this board have one idea what the openers will be. Actually, I couldn't care less about the openers, because I know they will be in line for attaining what the group asked for in the survey. I just care about the end product.... The WHOLE product. I know exactly where you are going to go after I said that, but I will let you fire away first just so I can frame the answer to fit your rant.

 

I just edited my ignore list.... Ahhhhhhh that is so much better. bye Carl, spew on.

 

Well that's interesting, because I do not remember ever meeting you.

My "mantra" is not emotion based. It's observation based. Ever since the bankruptcy, DALPA officials and aficionados have consistently focused on all the reasons why we supposedly cannot "reasonably" expect restoration. Every time somebody brings up the topic, they downplay the possibility. It's always the economy, "razor thin margins", Delta can't afford it, etc., etc. Some of these are challenges, but not hard and fast limitations. And then they try to make it sound like the improvements we've gotten since BK have us well on the way to where we want to be. And the Touch & Gos we received focused on comparisons and data that would tend to make the case against restoration, while leaving out data like a true comparison with SWA pilots W2's and C2K+COLA.

I could go on with my "rant"... but today is trade day for the investment method I use and I've got to get on with that.

We aren't going to agree on this. Your mind is made up and so is mine.

 

FINALLY! Someone writes the correct question!!!!!

George, that is the question we need to ask when engineering scope language. Scope has to be built for disasters, knowing that economic duress will place our contract under stress. Just as buildings codes assume earthquakes, fires, floods and storm.

The much ballyhoo's Contract 2000 included a number of block hour ratio provisions, limits on the operation of DCI aircraft and competing aircraft. People forget that these scope provisions failed nearly immediately after Contract 2000 was in force. I've got to get out some old dusty notes, but I think we gave up what today we would call "production balance" within 60 days of the contract's effective date. Regardless of whether it was 60 days, or 600, we all know what happened; Delta went from 90+% of its departures to somewhere around 40%. I think we can agree that when tested by economic stress, our scope sustained a structural failure.

Next question ... "why'd we do that?"

Pilots need to understand why we outsource. We outsource our flying in the hope Delta will make more money, some portion of which will be paid to us. ALPA partners with management in outsourcing our work (and lets not kid ourselves, the DPA would do the same).

When times get tough, the Company needs more money, desperately. The last thing they'll do is sever their profitable outsourcing strategy. The union's history shows their agreement when the Company is in dire straights. They'll write "better to save all pilots rather than saving a few."

The model then falls into traps of greed and fear. In good times we want more money funded by outsourcing, in bad times we want to avoid the whole outfit going out of business. That is why we now shrink in good times and bad. We are decoupled from the real performance of our airline.

The only long term answer is unity. We must perform our own flying and take the ups and downs with our Company.

 

I don't dive in here very often, and if I hit ignore every time I disagreed with a participant, pretty soon I'd be looking at a blank screen. I actually kinda like the vitriol and variety of viewpoints. Roll Green Wave!

 

Bar, thanks for writing that informative post. As I grope my way toward an understanding of this industry and our place in it, this kind of information is very helpful.

 

Yo Carl, I like your line of thinking: not SWAPA pay rates, but the whole SWAPA contract! I wonder how the NMB would react. Likewise I'd like to see management's conniption.

 

Good post Bar, I would only add that the long-term effects of having such a large portion of your (mainline's) customers flying their itineraries exclusively on RJs provides an inferior experience. Take a walk through the portal to b/c in dtw if you don't agree. The inferior customer experience has a negative impact on repeat business for the brand as a whole, driving more and more customers to products like southwest, netmeeting, skype, cars, trains (amtrak has set record loads 8 times since '00) etc..

I bring this up because while I agree with your assessment about the reasons behind scope concessions, I don't think that the end result helps the company in the long-term. On paper it may appear that they are reducing costs each year by outsourcing your flying but it's my opinion that the reduced quality of customer experience which results from the outsourcing ends up costing more in revenue as repeat customers go to other modes of transportation.

 

They would just paint them all white.

 

I don't understand this concept of taking the SWAPA contract in its entirety. For instance - if we had the SWAPA contract, word for word, then we wouldn't have pay scales for most of our fleets. That's ok, you say, we'll juts add a provision that says all of the other fleets will use the same pay scale. Heck, it would still be a pay raise for most pilots. The problem is, by doing that, you have, by necessity, modified the original contract and you no longer have the actual SWAPA contract. How about crew rest facilities? I bet there's no provision in the SWAPA contract for crew rest facilities - another thing that would have to be changed (or, do we just let mgt do their own thing wrt crew rest). 2 capts, 2 FO's on 12+ hour flights, isn't that in our contract as well? I guess we could go to 1 and 3 - captains are over rated any way. Again more changes.

I agree - there is probably much of the SWAPA contract that would be great for DL pilots (their scope is hard to beat) - but the whole contract, in it's entirety, without modification? I don't see how that would even work.