Details on Delta TA
06-01-2015, 01:53 PM
#5311
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Joined APC: Feb 2006
Position: 767A (Ret)
Posts: 6,248
Originally Posted by Professor
More importantly, does anyone know what went down at the meeting?
http://old-time.com/mp3s/shad39.mp3
06-01-2015, 02:13 PM
#5312
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: May 2012
Posts: 359
Originally Posted by Purple Drank
Can anyone confirm that Donatelli sent one of his aides to monitor the Council 1 meeting today?
I will say I have seen other MEC types at local meetings in the past. So I don't know if there was some type of monitoring going on.
I will also say that the council 1 pilots that were there were not afraid to let there opinions of the process be known. The resounding feeling is there is no reason for there to be concessions in this deal
06-01-2015, 02:19 PM
#5313
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Joined APC: Aug 2005
Position: tri current
Posts: 1,485
Forbes blogger view of the ME3 fight
The Emirates Strike Back: Persian Gulf Carriers Go On The Offensive VS U.S.' Big 3
Dan Reed - Forbes
As hair-pulling, skin-scratching, eye-gouging, “Yo Mama,” “so’s-your-old-man” catfights go, this one’s getting good.
One by one this week leaders of the three feisty, fast-growing and, apparently world-threatening state-owned airlines of the Persian Gulf region – Emirates Airlines, Qatar Airways, and Etihad Airways – publicly denounced the Big 3 U.S. airlines – American, United and Delta – for their aggressive, months-long attack campaign against the finances, character, and integrity of the Gulf carriers.
Yet, as expressed previously in this space, it’s not at all clear that this global spitting match will achieve anything for the Big 3. It is unlikely that they will win in any legal sense because it’s far from clear that any court anywhere would even hear such arguments, let alone have the authority to issue a definitive ruling. Nor is it very likely that the U.S. government, which is looking into the Big 3’s charges against the Gulf carriers, will negate 20-plus years of arduous diplomatic work in building a global network of “Open Skies” treaties that have greatly loosened the rules of international air service and benefitted consumers everywhere. Currently the U.S. has 112 such treaties in place. And the treaties with the Gulf States directly affect less than 2 percent of all international traffic to and from the United States.
So one has to ask why the Big 3 carriers bothered to pick this fight in the first place? They have next-to-no chance of winning it in any tangible sense. And in the court of public opinion they inevitably will be viewed as oligopolistic monsters whether they win or lose. Are they just trying to protect their hold on to their more than 50 percent of the world’s international air traffic against the minimal threat posed by a group of Middle Eastern upstarts – upstarts that are widely hailed for doing a much better job than the Big 3 when it comes to serving customers and making them happy?
To be sure, the Gulf carriers are not entirely innocent victims here. Qatar Airways, for example, openly admits that it loses money regularly in the name of building up that country’s travel and tourism reputation and the nation’s overall economy. And, despite vague hints that Qatar might one day sell some shares of itself to the public, all three companies are now, and are likely to remain tightly controlled by the governments and royal families of their respective nations. That means they’ll continue to operate behind a veil of financial secrecy, even if they do occasionally offer modest glimpses into their finances.
And the Gulf carriers surely have known for years that their very aggressive expansion into international markets one day would threaten first Europe’s big airlines and, then, eventually, the U.S. giants. As a natural result of both geography and the dangers of flying over worn-torn Southwest Asia and the high mountains of South Central Asia, the Gulf Region is an ideal place to build an international air travel hub connecting Europe and the Americas with Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australia and even China. That three different airlines have created three different nearby hubs in the Persian Gulf region to the job is testament to the power and attraction of those advantages and that strategic plan.
So why is this fight happening? And why now.
There are multiple theories being kicked around the industry.
•U.S. carriers, seeing how much traffic their European partners have lost to the Gulf carriers, are fighting to prevent the same thing from happening to them now that the Gulf carriers are aggressively expanding service to major U.S. cities.
•U.S. carriers are acting in defense of their European alliance partners by opening up another front in the public relations and global legal battle against the rapidly expanding Gulf carriers.
•The leaders of American and United, which have less at stake strategically in the matter than does Delta, are allowing themselves to be led by the nose by Delta CEO Richard Anderson, who was the first, and is the loudest complainer among the Big 3’s leaders.
•The Big 3 are using the Gulf carriers’ modest market incursions to create a boogey man against which they can rail publicly as a way of distracting the public from the big – though still not remarkable on a net margin basis – profits the U.S. carriers finally are earning.
•The fight against the Gulf carriers is a way to rally U.S. airline labor groups in support a management that’s seeking to protect U.S. jobs, thereby making it difficult for labor to fight management for big raises and increases in benefits now that the airlines are making decent money.
Plausible? Yes, in some ways each theory is. But none of those theories is entirely satisfying, either. That’s because each theory relies on other people – judges, bureaucrats, politicians, investors, labor leaders, and/or the traveling public – being extraordinarily gullible and easily persuaded to ignore significant counter arguments. Nor do those theories explain why IAG, the parent of British Airways and Iberia, has broken ranks with Europe’s other big carriers and the U.S. Big 3 and will have nothing to do with the attacks on the Gulf carriers. It’s notably that Qatar Airways owns 10% of IAG,. But even that doesn’t explain why American, BA’s closest ally and lead partner in the Oneworld global alliance continues to fight against the Gulf carriers. Furthermore, Qatar is itself a Oneworld member, and Etihad has a code sharing marketing partnership with American.
Beyond that, several Chinese carriers, as well as Turkish Airlines may have benefitted as much or more from their government-owned status as much or more as the Gulf carriers allegedly have benefitted. Yet the Big 3 are not going after them with an expensive and noisy public relations and legal campaign.
Thus, we’re left to conclude that this whole battle over alleged subsidies and unfair competition is really nothing more than a meaningless-yet-amusing catfight on a grand and global scale.
On Tuesday Emirates’ CEO Sir Tim Clark, a veteran British airline executive who is the guiding force behind Emirates’ rapid international growth, openly mocked the U.S. carriers for their pitiful customer service. “Have you been on a US domestic flight?’’ Clark asked in an interview with The National, an English-language paper in Abu Dhabi, Emirate’s home country. “It’s like travelling with a low-cost bus company. The terminals are full of frightened people sitting on the floors because they’ve no facilities, being shouted at by airline agents and cabin crew who are stressed themselves because of the working conditions.”
On Wednesday Akbar Al Baker, who has run Qatar Airways for 19 of its 21 years of existence, hosted a Washington, D.C. news conference at the posh Hay-Adams Hotel where he called the U.S. Big Three “greedy” companies that provide “crap service” to their customers. The reason they’re attacking is that the Big Three “can’t compete” with the extraordinarily high quality service for which Qatar and the other Gulf carriers are famous, Al Baker said.
Today, Etihad, Abu Dhabi’s second government-owned airline, will go after the Big 3 in a 19-page report detailing how the Big 3 (and the airlines they swallowed in consolidation over the last 15 years) have benefitted enormously from government subsidies and supports of various types. Etihad puts the total at $71.5 billion, including fuel tax waivers and government-backed financing at preferential rates. That dwarfs the $42 billion in subsidies that the Big Three, in a January report, alleged the three Gulf carriers had received from their governments. The Gulf carriers vehemently deny that they’re government-subsidized operations even though they are government-owned companies.
Yesterday, Jim Callaghan, an Irishman who is Etihad’s General Counsel and Company Secretary, previewed his company’s counter-attack, which it will formally launch today. “The combined benefits from just their bankruptcy proceedings and pension write-offs – regimes that are rather unique to the United States and which others around the world view as forms of subsidy – is rather astounding,” he said in a Forbes interview. “And we’ve not included the millions in subsidy they get each year through the Civil Reserve Aviation Fleet program to keep their planes available should there ever be a war, plus the very profitable rates they’d be paid if war were to break out and their planes actually called to duty.
“We’ve tried with this report to be very conservative on these numbers. This is not the full story of how much the big U.S. carriers benefit from government support. There’s a lot more money there. But this is a pretty big number as it is,” he said.
One supposes that such intramural squabbling is all good fun in the aviation industry cloak room. And, if you’re into such things, it’s even fun to watch from the outside looking in. But not for long, and it certainly appears that this battle, which the U.S. Big Three started in January, could drag on through at least the rest of this year. By then most of us will have tuned it out entirely, or we will have grown quite annoyed by the whole thing.
But, like all catfights, the amusement and attraction of it all will fade. Soon enough we’ll all go back to complaining about the poor quality of service on U.S. airlines – and maybe trying out the Gulf carriers’ service to see for ourselves if it’s really that much better.
Dan Reed - Forbes
As hair-pulling, skin-scratching, eye-gouging, “Yo Mama,” “so’s-your-old-man” catfights go, this one’s getting good.
One by one this week leaders of the three feisty, fast-growing and, apparently world-threatening state-owned airlines of the Persian Gulf region – Emirates Airlines, Qatar Airways, and Etihad Airways – publicly denounced the Big 3 U.S. airlines – American, United and Delta – for their aggressive, months-long attack campaign against the finances, character, and integrity of the Gulf carriers.
Yet, as expressed previously in this space, it’s not at all clear that this global spitting match will achieve anything for the Big 3. It is unlikely that they will win in any legal sense because it’s far from clear that any court anywhere would even hear such arguments, let alone have the authority to issue a definitive ruling. Nor is it very likely that the U.S. government, which is looking into the Big 3’s charges against the Gulf carriers, will negate 20-plus years of arduous diplomatic work in building a global network of “Open Skies” treaties that have greatly loosened the rules of international air service and benefitted consumers everywhere. Currently the U.S. has 112 such treaties in place. And the treaties with the Gulf States directly affect less than 2 percent of all international traffic to and from the United States.
So one has to ask why the Big 3 carriers bothered to pick this fight in the first place? They have next-to-no chance of winning it in any tangible sense. And in the court of public opinion they inevitably will be viewed as oligopolistic monsters whether they win or lose. Are they just trying to protect their hold on to their more than 50 percent of the world’s international air traffic against the minimal threat posed by a group of Middle Eastern upstarts – upstarts that are widely hailed for doing a much better job than the Big 3 when it comes to serving customers and making them happy?
To be sure, the Gulf carriers are not entirely innocent victims here. Qatar Airways, for example, openly admits that it loses money regularly in the name of building up that country’s travel and tourism reputation and the nation’s overall economy. And, despite vague hints that Qatar might one day sell some shares of itself to the public, all three companies are now, and are likely to remain tightly controlled by the governments and royal families of their respective nations. That means they’ll continue to operate behind a veil of financial secrecy, even if they do occasionally offer modest glimpses into their finances.
And the Gulf carriers surely have known for years that their very aggressive expansion into international markets one day would threaten first Europe’s big airlines and, then, eventually, the U.S. giants. As a natural result of both geography and the dangers of flying over worn-torn Southwest Asia and the high mountains of South Central Asia, the Gulf Region is an ideal place to build an international air travel hub connecting Europe and the Americas with Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australia and even China. That three different airlines have created three different nearby hubs in the Persian Gulf region to the job is testament to the power and attraction of those advantages and that strategic plan.
So why is this fight happening? And why now.
There are multiple theories being kicked around the industry.
•U.S. carriers, seeing how much traffic their European partners have lost to the Gulf carriers, are fighting to prevent the same thing from happening to them now that the Gulf carriers are aggressively expanding service to major U.S. cities.
•U.S. carriers are acting in defense of their European alliance partners by opening up another front in the public relations and global legal battle against the rapidly expanding Gulf carriers.
•The leaders of American and United, which have less at stake strategically in the matter than does Delta, are allowing themselves to be led by the nose by Delta CEO Richard Anderson, who was the first, and is the loudest complainer among the Big 3’s leaders.
•The Big 3 are using the Gulf carriers’ modest market incursions to create a boogey man against which they can rail publicly as a way of distracting the public from the big – though still not remarkable on a net margin basis – profits the U.S. carriers finally are earning.
•The fight against the Gulf carriers is a way to rally U.S. airline labor groups in support a management that’s seeking to protect U.S. jobs, thereby making it difficult for labor to fight management for big raises and increases in benefits now that the airlines are making decent money.
Plausible? Yes, in some ways each theory is. But none of those theories is entirely satisfying, either. That’s because each theory relies on other people – judges, bureaucrats, politicians, investors, labor leaders, and/or the traveling public – being extraordinarily gullible and easily persuaded to ignore significant counter arguments. Nor do those theories explain why IAG, the parent of British Airways and Iberia, has broken ranks with Europe’s other big carriers and the U.S. Big 3 and will have nothing to do with the attacks on the Gulf carriers. It’s notably that Qatar Airways owns 10% of IAG,. But even that doesn’t explain why American, BA’s closest ally and lead partner in the Oneworld global alliance continues to fight against the Gulf carriers. Furthermore, Qatar is itself a Oneworld member, and Etihad has a code sharing marketing partnership with American.
Beyond that, several Chinese carriers, as well as Turkish Airlines may have benefitted as much or more from their government-owned status as much or more as the Gulf carriers allegedly have benefitted. Yet the Big 3 are not going after them with an expensive and noisy public relations and legal campaign.
Thus, we’re left to conclude that this whole battle over alleged subsidies and unfair competition is really nothing more than a meaningless-yet-amusing catfight on a grand and global scale.
On Tuesday Emirates’ CEO Sir Tim Clark, a veteran British airline executive who is the guiding force behind Emirates’ rapid international growth, openly mocked the U.S. carriers for their pitiful customer service. “Have you been on a US domestic flight?’’ Clark asked in an interview with The National, an English-language paper in Abu Dhabi, Emirate’s home country. “It’s like travelling with a low-cost bus company. The terminals are full of frightened people sitting on the floors because they’ve no facilities, being shouted at by airline agents and cabin crew who are stressed themselves because of the working conditions.”
On Wednesday Akbar Al Baker, who has run Qatar Airways for 19 of its 21 years of existence, hosted a Washington, D.C. news conference at the posh Hay-Adams Hotel where he called the U.S. Big Three “greedy” companies that provide “crap service” to their customers. The reason they’re attacking is that the Big Three “can’t compete” with the extraordinarily high quality service for which Qatar and the other Gulf carriers are famous, Al Baker said.
Today, Etihad, Abu Dhabi’s second government-owned airline, will go after the Big 3 in a 19-page report detailing how the Big 3 (and the airlines they swallowed in consolidation over the last 15 years) have benefitted enormously from government subsidies and supports of various types. Etihad puts the total at $71.5 billion, including fuel tax waivers and government-backed financing at preferential rates. That dwarfs the $42 billion in subsidies that the Big Three, in a January report, alleged the three Gulf carriers had received from their governments. The Gulf carriers vehemently deny that they’re government-subsidized operations even though they are government-owned companies.
Yesterday, Jim Callaghan, an Irishman who is Etihad’s General Counsel and Company Secretary, previewed his company’s counter-attack, which it will formally launch today. “The combined benefits from just their bankruptcy proceedings and pension write-offs – regimes that are rather unique to the United States and which others around the world view as forms of subsidy – is rather astounding,” he said in a Forbes interview. “And we’ve not included the millions in subsidy they get each year through the Civil Reserve Aviation Fleet program to keep their planes available should there ever be a war, plus the very profitable rates they’d be paid if war were to break out and their planes actually called to duty.
“We’ve tried with this report to be very conservative on these numbers. This is not the full story of how much the big U.S. carriers benefit from government support. There’s a lot more money there. But this is a pretty big number as it is,” he said.
One supposes that such intramural squabbling is all good fun in the aviation industry cloak room. And, if you’re into such things, it’s even fun to watch from the outside looking in. But not for long, and it certainly appears that this battle, which the U.S. Big Three started in January, could drag on through at least the rest of this year. By then most of us will have tuned it out entirely, or we will have grown quite annoyed by the whole thing.
But, like all catfights, the amusement and attraction of it all will fade. Soon enough we’ll all go back to complaining about the poor quality of service on U.S. airlines – and maybe trying out the Gulf carriers’ service to see for ourselves if it’s really that much better.
06-01-2015, 02:33 PM
#5314
veut gagner à la loterie
Joined APC: Apr 2008
Position: Light Chop
Posts: 23,286
Originally Posted by Professor
No idea. But just going to throw out the idea that had the MEC not sent a rep; I would wager that you would be screaming about 'those arrogant and out of touch dictators' in Atlanta not coming.
Just saying.
More importantly, does anyone know what went down at the meeting?
Just saying.
More importantly, does anyone know what went down at the meeting?
all the time.
06-01-2015, 03:19 PM
#5316
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Joined APC: Jul 2007
Position: Permanently scarred
Posts: 1,707
Originally Posted by Professor
No idea. But just going to throw out the idea that had the MEC not sent a rep; I would wager that you would be screaming about 'those arrogant and out of touch dictators' in Atlanta not coming.
Just saying.
More importantly, does anyone know what went down at the meeting?
Just saying.
More importantly, does anyone know what went down at the meeting?
06-01-2015, 03:23 PM
#5318
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Joined APC: Apr 2014
Posts: 1,101
Originally Posted by Dorfman
I will also say that the council 1 pilots that were there were not afraid to let there opinions of the process be known. The resounding feeling is there is no reason for there to be concessions in this deal
06-01-2015, 03:59 PM
#5320
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Joined APC: Oct 2014
Position: Downward-Facing Dog Pose
Posts: 1,537
Originally Posted by Typhoonpilot
•The Big 3 are using the Gulf carriers’ modest market incursions to create a boogey man against which they can rail publicly as a way of distracting the public from the big – though still not remarkable on a net margin basis – profits the U.S. carriers finally are earning.
•The fight against the Gulf carriers is a way to rally U.S. airline labor groups in support a management that’s seeking to protect U.S. jobs, thereby making it difficult for labor to fight management for big raises and increases in benefits now that the airlines are making decent money.
•The fight against the Gulf carriers is a way to rally U.S. airline labor groups in support a management that’s seeking to protect U.S. jobs, thereby making it difficult for labor to fight management for big raises and increases in benefits now that the airlines are making decent money.
Question: why aren't these 2 explanatory motives entirely plausible? Deflection/distraction are a BIG part of how "leadership" works these days, in DC and elsewhere.
Plausible? Yes, in some ways each theory is. But none of those theories is entirely satisfying, either.
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