Apparently they were purchased and renamed.

 

From the ‘Time for ALPA’ thread at the American Airlines forum:




It comes as a shock to many regional new hire candidates that your brethren at the major you are code-sharing with generally does NOT look upon you as a junior colleague, but rather as a competitor - flying passengers that rightly ought to be flown by the pilots at the major and by doing so undercutting them and keeping their own wages lower. It doesn’t much matter if your connection is a “guaranteed interview”, an “Aviate” program, or a flow. And those guys have their own agendas. Don’t doubt there are guys on furlough right now (or at least will be again in 3 months) who would be delighted to slide down into the senior slots of their affiliated regionals rather than being on furlough fir a year or two.

That’s just reality.

it’s only one of the reasons that Khooj’s cheerleading is so ridiculous.

https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/a...e-alpa-16.html

 

when I was new here I often felt it was a one team mentality but have since learned otherwise. We are not on the same team by any metric other than name.

.

 

I’m glad that you figured it out. It is a good card to have in your back pocket if other desirable companies don’t call first, but the one team, you are part of AA...... is all a sales pitch to get new pilots to sign on. Flow is just a guarantee that you will eventually get a new hire date at a legacy, in this case, at AA. Working at Envoy for 10 years doesn’t mean that you worked for AA for the same amount of time, it just means that it took 10 years to start at AA right next to off the street hires coming out of the military and other companies.

 

I don't know why everyone is making this complicated. 'Flow' exists because it ensures that AA can keep their regionals staffed with younger pilots who cost half as much as a 'lifer' on year 20 pay, regardless of whether they go to AA or somewhere else. I'm sure the bean counters have run the numbers of retention vs pay vs training costs.

All the stuff about streamlined checklists/procedures, pay and admin, etc is all fluff. I find it hard to believe that an AA WO pilot would need any additional sim time adapting to Delta's checklists. I also don't think an hour of in-processing admin has any effect on whether they should hire OTS vs WO.

At PDT, we get less days off for less block hours, lower pay, and lower QoL in exchange for flow, but the flow is (expensive) insurance that as long as AA is hiring, there's a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it's 10 years away. At Republic or SkyWest, you might get picked up by a major after 3 years, but you also may never get a call or get TBNTs after a few interviews and your career stops there.

AA supposedly has enough cash to make it to next winter at current burn rates before Chapter 11 BK is on the table. If demand is back at even 80% of 2019, then AA will likely be operating at full capacity with their reduced fleet and in a much better position to negotiate interest on debt. I get that If they do go Chapter 11, then flow, pay, contracts, are all off the table.

When I was at CQ we were told by management that they expect it to take a year to bring all the furloughs back, then they expect to begin hiring (and flowing) again early 2022. Anecdotally, the PDT pilot group is very motivated to move on to their next thing. Even without flow, my seniority has grown a decent amount this year. I know that if AA doesn't go BK, I'll be there after 8 years of paying dues, worst case (based on current seniority and no outside attrition), if I don't get hired somewhere else, first.

 

I don't see any listing under Sterling either.

https://www.transportation.gov/sites...r%202020_1.pdf

 

Just click on their website link from my previous post... it’s on their press release from July 23,2020.
It’s probably not done being processed or something. It is the government after all.

 

Not exactly how that works. Bond interest is market driven and that market is driven by ratings of the bonds from rating agencies vs offered yield. The $2.5 billion that AA sold this summer was rated at junk bond levels and as a consequence they had to offer a coupon of 11,75%. But even at that is didn’t sell at par, meaning a nominal $1000 purchase actually sold for less than that driving the debt service on what did sell up to 12%.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...l-to-2-billion

While AA has relatively little bond debt maturing this next year (I think one tranche of about $500 million and another of $750 million, IIRC) they will either have to refinance that at market rates or use $1.25 Billion of their current liquidity (a month of operations at current burn rates) to cover those expenses. But is the next year - 2022 - that the existing bonds really start maturing for a lot of the fleet modernization. Those bonds were sold at exceptionally low rates because times were good, the airline industry was doing well, and the bonds were collateralized by the new aircraft themselves. But now the aircraft are no longer new, and with all the airlines that have tanked, a glut of good late model used aircraft and even new ‘white tail’ aircraft have driven down used aircraft value. These bonds were always going to have to either be paid off (which AA won’t have the cash to do) or refinanced at a higher rate, but no one five years ago anticipated the rates would go as high as they are now, meaning AAs debt service, currently $1.3 Billion a year after this summers junk bond sale, is going to go higher.

To put that in perspective, AAs 2019 profit was about $2 Billion on revenues of about $46 Billion, not a profit margin that is going to allow them to pay off many of their maturing bonds. Their situation is analogous to someone with a lot of credit card debt keeping afloat by repeatedly transferring the balance from the old credit credit card to a new credit card, always at a higher interest.

Unless business and international flying comes back quickly - or they can sell those assets to someone else - they are going to find it hard to get refinancing at affordable prices.

Their current strategy, downsizing to profitability, won’t help flow much either...

 

Yes, because there is such a shortage of E145 around to be leased on the drop of a hat.... all they need is one airframe in operation to get all programs and certificates approved. Further, without tying themselves down with owned aircraft (like Air Wiskey) they can fly whatever the CPA partner wants them to lease. I'd keep an eye on this one. They could go in a completely different direction and focus on the charter business, but the rumblings indicate CPA-FFD work. Especially with bringing Heller on board.

 

For those just tuning in this sums the situation up pretty well. There are only painful outcomes for the quagmire AA finds itself in.