My guess is the loss of the pension and a decade of stagnation ate up most if not all of that.

Maybe not. If anything, the "whole story" might be MORE than $1 million per pilot. :eek:

deleted... I seem to be repeating myself today for some reason...

Could be. So then you can't add that loss to the loss in pay rates, right?

While we did give up our DB plan, we did not lose that money completely. I think it only fair that you include those numbers in your calculations, and if you choose to do so, while difficult to do, you would need to factor in the value trend line then versus now. I guess you would have to take your payrates then, project them forward (based on some sort of pay increase... I guess inflation??) and figure the 60%FAE. but since you have no idea what equipment you would have been flying.. and since bigger pays more... and half of bigger is being sold for scrap iron... how do you do that? My retirement investments have done OK, and I am quite pleased with the returns I have gotten to date. Would that be comparable to the DB plan? I have no idea, but I think it is pretty flippant to throw out a number like $1 million per pilot without a decent frame of reference, and your simple comparison doesn't get me there. I would love to have you convince me, but all I see is an emotional number with to little fact other than a projected payrate. I don't mean that in a derogatory way either. I would love to see a real analysis.

[QUOTE=DAL 88 Driver;1737926]My guess is the loss of the pension and a decade of stagnation ate up most if not all of that.


I thought you have posted that with the various cash pots of money the pension plan was converted to, plus the DC plan your pension is now better then the converted plan. Call me confused. Did you lose your pension plan or get a better one?

T, if he stipulates that his numbers aren't exact, would you stipulate that they're reasonable? I think you're both on the same side of the argument but caught up in the scale.

Actually I rarely agree with him but in this case I think the numbers are reasonable for at least the first few years. The inflation aspect is a bit hard to quantify because there are different numbers out there. One interesting thing is the average pay for workers in the US over the last 7 years has declined in real dollars. Very few work groups have seen any raises.

No I won't, because I think he is leaving out a really big part of this. If you just want to talk about "restoration" of payrates, his math is fine. When you start to project things like the loss of the DB plan, it gets real sticky real fast. PBGC money DC and investments from the note and claim all have to be added in, and I have no idea how to do it. I do know that the numbers I run at home with my abacus and slide rule don't paint nearly as dire a picture as he does. YMMV. It is an interesting debate however, but not nearly as clear cut as some like to make it.

Now I am the one confused. You say on one hand that his numbers make sense, but on the other you talk about the retirement account factor. Which is it?

Like I said to ragingwhite... Payrate wise his argument has some merit. Overall picture wise, I have yet to be convinced.

Fair Enough. I would think our actuarial (sp?) experts would be able to assign a valid number to it. I assume when the JV cure period ends we'll grieve based on a similar algorithm (money lost due to missed flying normalized to our equipment/rates). I have a similar abacus but I imagine someone's got a TI-66 and can figure it out. Cheers