New Direct Entry Captain bonus’
 

Why have we heard for the last 3 months that we will not have any more direct entry captains and that the program is over ...also we had no standing captain vacancy this past bid and now the sudden this huge urge for captain qualified candidates overnight? Is something happening behind the scenes? More airframes? New base? More flying than expected for the envoy winter schedule ? Or spring schedule?

It’s not a direct entry captain program. They come in as FOs and are going to get displaced on the first vacancy bid they hit.

Who cares how they come they get 55k. You get your meager pay raise yet in your check

In my personal opinion, the meager increase in flow is not the catalyst for the sudden need for captain qualified pilots.

With the AIP Fiasco, you’d think the company was broke. It's was all a setup for LVA 2.0.

LEC Reps voted for this. Gave up so much money for a quick deal to be made. Envoyed again. Yay! No concessions tho right?

Congratulations to the NH’s FO’s coming on board with 900+ 121 time! Force upgrade to Capt! Yay! Come on down grab this bag of money! Make tons of bonus money, plus CA pay upon seat displacement vacancy!

Just in time for the market to be flooded with TSH & Mesa pilots looking for a new home.

LVA blue print form Air Wisconsin & ExpressJet mass exodus! This is LVA 2.0.

I wasn't here for HVA. Is that what really happened?

They zero out on captains everyday on the 145.

$55k isn't worth being at the bottom of captain seniority list for 2+ years making min pay. We got the bonus because a bunch of FOs sat on their ass's for 3 years not getting time to upgrade.

what are those acronyms?
LVA 2.0, TSH?

Same on 175, at least in DFW.

LVA2.0= High(Low) Value Aviator Recycled
TSH = Trans States Holdings-Hulas’ Goat Show
I keed, I keed😁

I understand what it potentially going on at TSH/Compass, but why a flood from Mesa?

I am not familiar with what is taking place there??

They haven’t had their UA contracts extended, so far at least, and AA has pulled a couple of jets due to poor performance. The UA contract is for 60 175s.

Ah.

When are the UA contracts expiring?

Realistically, does UA even have anyone who can take over all of that flying?

That's a lot of flying to take on suddenly. About the same as ALL of our 175 flying.

It's about 600 pilots.

Expressjet had a hiring target of 600 pilots for 2019, if that says anything. They have a 175 program starting and United owns half of them.

That flying probably is the hail mary Compass is going for.

I can't see how TSH management is sitting on that house fire saying "everything is fine, this is normal".

The whole UAX portfolio is a disaster.

This^^^ between the expressjet newly added 175s and the possibility of compass covering the rest of the 175s that could easily make up for the loss of Mesa contract

As of November AAG will have removed 7 CRJ900s from contract with Mesa. And Mesa has yet to have its contracts extended with United even though the date has come and gone. They’re basically month-to-month at this point.

Compass could win those United 175 contracts though personally I don’t think that will happen. Mesa’s UA 175 performance is actually quite good and they are comparatively cheap. I do think however that they are likely to lose their AAG CRJ900 flying and it will get divided up between PSA, Envoy, and SkyWest in PHX.

The likely culprit if Envoy is being primed for more 175s is the 20 aircraft that Compass are currently flying coming back in house to Envoy. That’s just my WAG. Though Mesa’s stock is down over 30% since the last quarter. So something is up over there...

The market is still unimpressed by Mesa today:

Could Envoy win the United 175 contract?

Will we get the CPP to United? Because if so then I say go for it.

Yeah, sure can to do United's flying when we currently junior man captains 2 times a month.

Three days before ENY/UAX go-live: "Sorry, our bosses at AAG say we weren't allowed to negotiate for this. We take it back."

You exceeded your authority.

The new bonus structure is completely against the contract! The company is advertising bonuses to be paid out at the end of IOE and the end of one year. But this is not in the contract or any side letters.

Oh that, well it's only a contract violation. Mec procedure is to do it and grieve it later. So, mec is up to bat.

Doesn’t seem like the MEC wants to get their hands dirty

Is anybody surprised?

Yet another grievance due to management ignoring basic contract law, and imposing their will on the pilot group, and a union more concerned with flowing than making waves. Honestly, I don’t blame them.... fighting back sure didn’t help Neal or me... and sends a great message to the MEC. Stay within bounds or they’ll target you too.

If we had a real union, when the company fires 1/6th of the MEC in one month (the two reps who fight them the most) then a real union would have had 3,000 pilots marching on centerport the next day with media coverage to boot. Nothing even close to that happened. They filed a grievance.

Get in, get your hours and get out. Keep the flow as a last resort backup. Don’t fight them or make waves, the only one to lose will be you. Get your hours and go someplace better. Plenty of options these days. It’s a great time to be a pilot.

Pretty sad day when even you are conciliatory.

We had the chance to change the system. One regional airline pilot group can't do it alone. Every pilot group was voting no to concessions. Some two and three times. Then one pilot group raised their hands and said we'll take the concessions, along with their planes. Later their MEC even tried to argue they should get our pilots with the planes due to their staffing shortage. That gave management the ability to walk into crew rooms and tell our FO's, "trade in your Envoy ID for a XXX ID and you'll upgrade sooner, and flow to AA faster than if you stay here." Yes, they actually did that, and yes many did go over there and honestly, it does accelerate the career of the individual that does it, but it kills the bargaining power of the EVERY other pilot group that had been voting no.

Without that unity (that we did have at the time), you can not win at the regional level. Anytime they have the ability to simply shift the flying to somebody else, both in and out of section six, then the deck is stacked against you.

If you put yourself on their radar, they just hunt and peck at every little thing you do, even when it's really nothing. They will fabricate violations out of thin air, and hold hearings that go nowhere on the fabrications, then refuse to remove the proven inaccurate records from your file forcing you to file grievances to remove each bogus record. Ask me how I know.

There are things you can do. You can fly FM-1. However, you don't want t be the only one doing it exactly as they have written. You need buy in from the majority of the pilot group. Sadly, the union can't even do more than just remind the pilots to fly safely according to FM-1... as prior cases at other carriers have hamstrung them from saying more as it could be construed as inciting a labor action.
If you were around for my emails on Bird/Bug strikes and the CAT-2 fiasco, then you're probably aware the company tried to claim they were illegal job actions. Simply notifying pilots what the company did to another crew, and reminding pilots what was in our CBA was enough for the company to try to make charges of a labor action.

The company fired 3 of the past 5 NY Captain Reps when I was there for sticking up for their pilots. One was fired seven times, and two were fired twice. The company fired the DFW CA Rep within a month of me. At the time they considered us their two biggest thorns in the side. They once called the MEC office when I happened to be there threatening to fire me because I called Jerry Glass a Jackass. They wanted me to delete the posting, print an apology and consider myself lucky they didn't fire me for rule 32 since he was technically an AAG employee/contractor. I told them I wasn't deleting it, that anybody that asks me what he's like will get the same answer, and they can go to hell. They didn't fire me that time, but it would have been three times if they had.

I do know they did fire me for 4 cases of alleged sick abuse, and when I produced medical records for the absences they declined to receive the documentation, and responded "we don't need to see those, you're discharged." I was back to work about a month later.

The second and final time was them claiming I had lied about resigning from a union position. A typo of the effective had been made, and subsequently corrected, but they considered it misleading.... and they accused me of being involved in the Charlie Bucket website and facebook page which was not me. While I did have involvement with the union campaign, I did no have anything to do with those two websites. In any event, back then social media transgressions where handled by bringing the alleged offender down to HQ for the grand tour of HQ to meet-n-greet all the managers in what we jokingly called the scared straight session. Everybody else got that; I got fired..... again.

Anyway, the point is that until the RLA is modified the strength of the union at the regional levels is very limited. It isn't like United. The company can't go to a United pilot and say take these concessions or we are giving your flying to Delta. They can do that at the regionals.

I tried at the 2014 ALPA National Board of Directors meeting to get modifying the RLA commensurate with modern regional business practices to be put on to the ALPA PAC task list. That motion triggered about 3.5 hours of presentations by ALPA lawyers on why the committee should not pass my resolution to the floor. The motion failed in committee.

I did manage to get a motion to direct the PAC and Natonal to defend the 1500 hour rule passed in committee and on the floor, and the campaign you've seen from ALPA National on pilot pay and the 1500 hour rule was due to your Envoy MEC. At that same BOD meeting your Envoy MEC was able to get National to create the National level office of Regional Coordinator, and they began actively running classes, programs, meetings and job fairs to help guys get out of the regionals and onto the majors.

Anyway, back to being conciliatory..... facts speak for themselves. Anybody who has fought them hard, has lost. I do not want to see that happen to other pilots. If they can learn from me and Neal that the management at the regionals are all unethical and the system is stacked against fighting them successfully, then they can focus on getting in, getting their hours, and moving up and out as quickly as possible.

Luckily, I ended up at a great carrier, and will upgrade on the 76 soon. It doesn't always work out that way, I was lucky that a good employer took the time to look past the word "termination" and review the actual records.

I don't like it, I don't agree with it, but it is the truth. If that can help the next generation have a quicker easier time than we did, then I've done something good and positive with something negative.

https://youtu.be/RUFT35S7Jb4

Any idea where the 6 crj9 have gone that AAG pulled from Mesa?

They sit around the B stinger, usually getting used as maintenance spares.

I think it’s actually 4 planes pulled. 2 are in the Mesa house livery, and 2 more get pulled in November. I assume they will be spares too.

7 total as of November. It’s all in the Mesa quarterly investor call transcript. It’s also partly why PSA is beginning DFW flying in November. The flying will have to get covered even if Mesa can’t seem to do it. And this is in no way a dig at Mesa pilots. Their management is failing them.

My understanding is part of the issue at least is staffing. The United side has more stringent staffing requirements in their contract so new hires and upgrades go to that side.

Is that a failure of management? Ultimately.

If you look at the Mesa cancellations in the portal, they are mostly coded as maintenance cancellations, with a few daily crew cancellations on top of them. Roughly a 80/20 split. They just don't seem to have the capability to fly the schedule they are given.

100% agree, it's ultimately a management issue.

My understanding is that they often code cancellations as Mx when in fact they may be other reasons. Like a lack of a crew to operate a flight. They do this to not spook their investors... allegedly.

That sounds like a fraud lawyers wet dream.

Mesa cant cover its schedule so numb nuts dp brings in psa, well our schedule need efficiency and that flying would help. Now psa will say the need efficiency and numb nuts will give psa more envoy flying. Y'all should understand, irregardless of what some say, envoy is at the bottom of pecking order. Skw, rah and psa are growing while envoy bounces like a yoyo on a short string

Envoy will be getting more 175s /growth. If Mesa exits the Eagle fold PSA alone won’t be able to cover all of that flying. I’d wager the bulk of it would be replaced by 175s in DFW and PSA would get the 16 American-owned CRJ900s.