Hats are not on the table, so there is no leverage given up in the future.

I've had Hat kids tell me they don't want to risk being told no by delta in the GIP if someone working there notices they aren't wearing their hat now. True.

Or "ive waited all my life for this, I'm not gonna screw up anything now."

He was telling me this while jump seating, about to pull from gate and he was still on ready reserve. Apparently for new kids, hats mean more than NFAs.

True and informative story

So there I was, about to go in to my Delta Guaranteed Interview...I was nervous, but confident that I was prepared for any question they were going to throw at me...

A door opens. A tall mustached man calls my name and says "Son, you ready?"

"Yes Sir!" I reply with a forced smile.

The man leads me into a room with two men sitting at a table. On this table are pictures of me walking through the terminal. Some I recognized as DTW, ATL, but the one closest to me was for sure at LGA. It was me making a gate announcement from the podium.

A sense of pride started growing in me...'these guys know I make gate announcements...I give the passengers good customer service' I thought to myself, as my confidence was growing.

"Do you know what I see in these pictures, Jeff?" one of the men says to the other.

"No hat?" Replies the man.

"Exactly...No hat." he says with a sigh. "Thanks for giving Delta a shot son. You can try again in 6 months."

Dude.

That would be a double NO.

I'm asking not in a critical way, but in an I-wasn't-here-and-don't-know way. Did we give up something specific to make hats optional? If yes, what was it?

I'd suggest you ask T.W. that the next time you are in recurrent... in fact, I'll do just that myself if I get another chance. He was the one that fought for that when he was MEC chairman. It put us in line with NWA policy back then.

Endeavor pays his mortgage now. If i was in Tom position and you asked me that I'd say, ive got a couple kids going through college, you pay for it and my retirement and I'll take off the hat.

The Tom hate is borderline stupid. Im not saying that it comes across as stupid. I'm saying anyone that questions Tom's alpa career and his dedication to pilots is stupid. He gets paid a lot of money to push hats, and if they paid me that money I'd do it to music with a cane and jazz hands.

Don't wanna wear the hat? Don't wear the hat. And you can thank Tom every time you do for not giving in to the company.

I've heard it had to do with ready reserve, don't know what specifically about it, lower number of times per month?

Might be able to figure it out, 95% of the JCBA was originally Mesaba contract language, so if what we've got currently for ready reserve is the same or worse than Mesaba's ready reserve language then we'd know.

I think it was Pinnacle pilots that wanted to avoid the hat, the hat was required at Mesaba, though lots of guys didn't wear it.

Hat was only required from may day to Halloween, and I'd guess half of us did it.