Not really, no. Engineering degree instead. I just don’t sweat stuff as much. I’ll be fine so will OP, as well as the pilot group at AA.


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Ah, engineering. Are there a lot of temp jobs available in engineering during a recession?


https://i.ibb.co/23rjsq3/94-D2792-F-...5199274966.jpg


https://i.ibb.co/nQV5SPn/F8640542-3-...EA7-BCC3-C.jpg

Don’t know, not necessary for me to know. Plenty of connections, if needed. Wife can carry everything with her job if needed. Zero issue. Live where you can drive to work, work the system, work minimally, and don’t sweat stuff = happy work life balance imho. Others, feel free to worry and HUSTLE your gate on go home day for that commute to a financially stronger airline in a seniority based non-rev system, (or DL while they have temporary, non-contract +space commuting) risking commuting for the foreseeable future, to a junior base for reserve, then upgrade quickly, again to a junior base for reserve, for the foreseeable future. Or move to an expensive “in financially stronger airline base” city with dramatically increased real estate prices/taxes, pay the moving fees, the initial apartment and storage fees while figuring out where to buy an overpriced home, and try to relocate your wife’s job as painlessly as possible for her, or face being a perpetual commuter. This “awesome” situation obviously changes the further out the flow is, but the doom and gloom about AA is just lost on me. Oh and don’t forget to complain about it on APC please. I’ll read it from my boat in lake Dallas on Long call reserve at AA. I’ll feel your pain, I promise. OP you do what’s good for you and your fam. My 2cents.


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On that much we can agree.

Cool. Some must not mind dealing with commuting. I avoid it all cost. Airline financial health be damned.


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nah, dgaf about the numbers, staring at them isn't a part of my job description. Just can't get over the gag reflex when a compass fo -> wherever you are right now pops in with their analytics every single time someone has a AA question. Are you MQ? No. AA? No. Why are you here then? Every.single.time? Heads up - looked very pathetic a year ago, even more so now. Be happy where you're at and let go. Just let go.

That would be great - if ignoring reality actually CHANGED reality.

It doesn’t.

The SEC REQUIRES companies to publish these “numbers” because they are important, whether you care about them or not.

The numbers shouldn't matter to someone already in the AAG system, but they may be relevant to someone looking at options.
No-one will jump between legacies just because of financials, but it may play a role if someone has multiple offers on the table.

For all the talk of a "Compass FO" coming here and posting their opinion, let's turn the tables and point on the sheer hypocrisy of the anti Envoy posters that are here on a regular basis. Some have previous positions within the union and left on their own accord. Why? Well, they've explained that ad nauseam here over and over. One thing that I think of immediately when these posts bashing American come up is, one word, jealousy. American is the largest airline in the world and right now, with the amount of retirements, your career is on a rocket trajectory. These poor guys and gals can only watch from the cockpit of their new "carrier" as a shiny AA 787 passes them as they sit idly by with a mechanical on their antiquated bygone era jet. Seriously, please post in your new forum. There is no reason to continue posting here.

Yeah, but unless you’re an executive, worrying about reality doesn’t change reality either. There’s a reason for the saying “ignorance is bliss.”

You are certainly the pot to call the kettle black.

Bigger isn’t necessarily better.

You know what they say. Just like mopeds, they may be a lot of fun, but you wouldn’t want your friends to see you with one. Or maybe you wouldn’t know about that.

All that being said, different strokes for different folks. One man’s trash is another one’s treasure. But there are certainly risks and one in the hand beats two in the bush.

Is that enough clichés for one post?

Update your AA app with your Delta CJO and leverage it into an OTS hire. If AA doesn’t take you then go ahead and get your head sized for that sweet hat.

If you have two options on the table wouldn’t you like to look at relevant information concerning those making those offers? If you were buying stock, wouldn’t you want to know if the company were making money and what their prospects were? If you saw a humongous cell on the radar scope wouldn’t you maybe want to divert around it, even if the finer points of meteorology weren’t really your thing?

Sometimes ignorance ISN’T bliss. H€||, sometimes it can be fatal.

TL;DR
When people ask questions about something in a forum section related to that something and someone who is in no way, shape or form is related to that something keeps providing their invaluable insight - that's a pathology.

just don’t bring up queuing.

damn brits

Oh yeah? Like sitting in a clapped out 145 watching a shiny AA 787 roll by knowing that with your 8-10 year flow you’ll be behind the hiring wave and thus never be able to even hold 787 FO? Gotcha.

What’s your angle here? Do you work at aa? Disgruntled investor, have a ton of stock shorted? Or are you just a standard airline pilot who’s insecure and has to show everyone how smart they are by breaking down corporate finance? We get it, you hate American, do you do any other tricks or is that it?

It’s not exactly revolutionary to predict stiff financial headwinds and elevated risk of BK for AAG. That’s the consensus position of published market analysts.

Pls no more truth bombs ._.

No. People who reply to a pertinent comment with TL;DR, are showing THEIR pathology. If you don’t have the time or interest to read something, there is no chance you can give a meaningful reply to it. Nor should you expect people to take your comment seriously when you are posting on something you claim to have not even read.

Ad hominem attacks don’t trump facts. I have nothing whatever against AA, and don’t even think their management did anything wrong. But the cards fell the wrong way with a number of factors beyond their control including the timing of their fleet renewal, NEO and MAX development, COVID, the rebound of flying, the shortage of regional CAs and upgrade eligible FOs, inflation, and a likely coming recession. They are too big to fail, but they would not be my choice of the best legacy to be a junior FO in for the next several years.

Which is the question the OP asked.

So why do you feel obligated to go to ad hominem attacks simply because I hold a different opinion than you? I blamed you for none of the things I quoted. I don’t even BLAME AA. That’s just the way the cards fell.

Ok, call it Theory of Constraints. PotAYto or PotAHto,, you still wind up in the same place.

Will I miss anything NEW if I don't read yet another one of your AA posts?

I have a new theory, actually.
What if you are, in fact, MW and this is what you do in between starting forest fires in CA??

You won't miss anything new if you don't read *any* of his posts. Always the same stuff over and over and over...I'm beginning to think it's some sort of spambot.

There is an ignore function if you desire to use it. I’ve blocked five people myself who I thought contributed more to noise than to signal. It works fairly well IMHO. That would remove any temptation to read any of my postings without even the necessity to post TL;DR.

Nah, I don't ignore. It's APC - those of us that aren't out looking for work are here *because* of the noise. :D We all have other resources that are far better than this site when it comes actually getting useful information about our jobs. I just wish you'd change it up a little. I don't even necessarily disagree with anything you say, but you have close to 8,000 posts and as far as I can tell it's all spread across maybe four different talking points.

You are more optimistic than others there. They hyperleveraged the airline while cutting down the product, assuming people will pay for convenience over service. That didn't happen, and that is why they are 12 Billion less valuable (based on simple shareholders equity) than the next Legacy carrier, and they need over a decade of "best year ever" profits before they are even solvent.

It won't matter to an average pilot there, but it does not dilute the point you are making - AA is financially an absolute clusterf*ck.

Pretty shocking, especially since they’re in an industry well known for sound financial footing and traditional smooth roads financially.

:D :D :D

filler

Recruiting doesn't care?
 

I asked recruiting to change my flight. Its on AA and there are plenty of seats on the later flight - finally three days later "We are unable to change your flights, sorry. See you at the interview." My introduction to the company thus far has been sub-par. This the norm?

First off, I don’t work for Envoy, but, if I were you, I’d think before I posted something like that. Your post is pretty detail specific. If that is exactly what the recruiter said, or close to it, they could immediately identify you on here. They do scour these forums, you know. Having said that, the decision rests with you obviously as to whether you should take their offer or not. Just understand that a lot of regionals are hurting big time right now with staffing problems, so they may not have as much flexibility as they used to. So it’s not something unique to envoy.

You don't work for Envoy. TLDR.

Without putting too fine a point on it, yes, that is entirely the norm. I'm pleased you got your first taste of the Envoy experience before even interviewing. The reason they are "unable" to change your flight is probably because it would require 10 or 15 keystrokes from one of our back office eaters.

You need to make peace with you and your well-being not being valued by the company if you want to make it here without burning out. This isn't necessarily a big deal - we're a unionized labor force, we have an adversarial relationship with management 99% of the time (1% of the time they give us cheap pizzas in the break room), and only receive human dignity when we can force them to give it to us in highly specific terms in the contract by crushing or tricking them in negotiation - and even then, they sometimes operate in open defiance of the contract, or renege on deals they signed.

Your post sounds like you expect Envoy to give you some kind of premium experience. I urge you to look elsewhere if that's really what you want, you won't get it here, and even if you get it from recruiting it's going to go away sooner rather than later once you have an employee number.

@10 per class it makes sense they put minimal effort into getting folks in the door. I believe skywest is running much bigger classes. Envoy is shrinking rapidly.

Welcome to the American Airlines Group experience.

“Helping people on life’s journey” is not applicable to Employees.

Just go somewhere else. Setting aside NoValue's usual beef with mgt, you got some pretty reasonable advice that you waded past.

this
Filler

The stock buybacks. AA management spending money that they didn't even have on stock buybacks. They did do that pretty wrong.

I don't remember the figures, but it was quite the deal two years ago when bailouts were in talks. The AA number was so negatively skewed that, when averaged with the other majors, it looked like every airline put almost all of their equity into stock buybacks.

Everything is relative. As I recall, nearly all the managements were doing stock buybacks.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/041702.asp

With the fed lending money at ridiculously low prices it likely seemed like a great alternative to holding cash or even buying aircraft with cash. The stockholders are - after all - the actual owners of the business and they want income on their investment too. People tend to forget that. And when the fed is loaning money at less than the rate of inflation, it’s generally a win-win to finance rather than pay cash. But the fed has changed policies and they are driving up interest intentionally, faster than AA can pay down that debt, so eventually these low interest bonds will need to be refinanced at the higher rates, causing an even greater cash drain. For AA the timing turned out to be bad. If the pandemic had never happened and earnings had just continued it would be far less of a problem.

The problem was they did the buybacks when the stock was riding high only to have to sell stock when it was tanking because of the pandemic. Which is kind of how most people who lose money in the stock market lose money in the stock market. Now investors know that they’ll have to wait a long time to see any return on their investment so that keeps the stock price low.

Now the problem is stock dilution. When the measure of merit is earnings per share and you have a lot of shares of stock out there it takes a lot of earnings to get your earnings per share up to something attractive. That will make it difficult to raise money at reasonable rates for years in the future, which is why most airlines bonds are junk rated right now.

https://i.ibb.co/3mdwM5r/A51-C6-A44-...627-C89-A6.jpg

Financial and corporate people look at Debt to ASSET ratios. They do not look at Debt to Equity.

If a company that has to buy equipment, via Debt, is in a position where they have no Equity, that does not mean they are not credit worthy.

As an example, if a person just starting out buys a house, and has no equity (calculated like they are a business), their debt to equity is zero. But, assuming they put down 20% on the house, their debt to asset ratio is 0.80. Which would a bank consider in making the house loan?

Another barometer is what percentage of their free cash flow (you may call it income, but more properly it is free cash flow) has to be dedicated to paying the debt, and is that reasonable.