Exactly. That is why we need to have greater protections in our scope. We, as a union, allow some wiggle room.

"We thought they would never do that" should be changed to "They will exploit anything if we give them the opportunity."

TEN

 

My fantasy? Yeah, I want to fly narrowbodies overseas.... What i want, is to prevent flying narrowbodies overseas. The A321 NEO can fly Boston To Europe. Boeing is planning a NEW narrowbody that will EASILY do the same.

Change to block hours from EASK at your own PERIL. Managements desire to change this is for this very reason!

 

The blok hour/EASK thing could go either way. As much as you think it is a no brainer, it isn't. I have a tendency to believe that AF/KLM et al will be buying more big 777s which will make the EASK the better metric. If they don't, and go with 330s we will lose on that. That's just my opinion and it is every bit as valid as yours. The problem isn't the airplane. It's the payscale. But we have what ya'll want, so...

Oh, and we cannot prevent management from their deployment plan. We can't force them to buy widebodies. If you believe that there is no helping you.


#quityer*****inaboutpayrates

 

Currently, we have EASK. Of course we can prevent management from executing a change to narrowbodies. They change to narrowbodies and become further out of compliance. Now the question is what will the union get for that... 30 million, what a joke!

 

Why do you think management would want to fly narrowbodies as opposed to widebodies? What would be their logic in doing that? Spite? Maybe they have a desire to lose money? They are going to fly what is most profitable for DAL to fly. You should be happy about that to a degree because it will grow your PS payout and you don't have to work for it.

Balance.

Oh, and $30M wasn't a joke. It was a precedence. We got boned on that.

 

JV's suck. We should be flying our passengers on our metal with our pilots, or we should be compensated as if we are.

 

It is more than just a red herring it is a possibility. A small possibility I will grant you, but possible nonetheless - which raises 2 questions in my mind:

1. If the company has no plans for this why would they want to change to BHs?

2. Again - if the company has no plans for this - why not put additional NB contractual protections in any agreement - or leave it with EASKs?

Finally look at Hawaii - we are now flying 737-900s to the islands. A different market, but who would have called that 10 or 20 years ago? We have a responsibility to think long term regarding our PWA protections.

Scoop

 

You have a poor understanding of how a global airline needs to function. You also seem to assume that if we ended all the JV's we would do the flying ourselves. Route authorities, politics and economics would insure that never happens or even comes remotely close. Rumor is that our JV negotiations with the Chinese our not going well. If that goes south we are going to lose a bunch of planned international flying as well as all the passengers that would have been fed into our domestic system from China.

 

There is no current aircraft and nothing being offered that makes this a threat. The Boeing mom aircraft looks more and more like it will be a twin aisle 767 direct replacement. We have twin aisle protections in the contract.

 

That is a great point and something that I've been pondering. It seems with our less than average international presence, somewhere along the line our management may have been asleep at the wheel. Because as you suggest, international route authority does not happen at the snap of DAL's fingers. It seems, based on UAL's and AA's widebody fleet growths compared to DAL's, that our competitors have done a better job of nurturing and growing their international presence.

Now extrapolate that to DAL's future international presence. IF we do get all of our widebody orders (350, 330), that would represent a growth from where we are today. Where will we use them? With our paltry current widebody count, we are getting crowded out of the international markets by our rapidly growing competitors - a market that is finite with external government limitations. This is yet another reason why I don't put a lot of faith in our widebody "orders". The deferral of some of our early 350's only reinforces my doubts.