Those 300-400 are going to have to retire soon anyway, and chances are they will hold out for a buyout too even if the TA passes unless ALPA is foolish enough to let an additional buyout be rolled into the TA. Anyone who would trade the stability and earnings of the rest of their career just to get a few months of faster seniority progression is a fool.

option 1 would have let Raj shrink the company even more. Not worth $28k and industry worst compensation and retirement.

 

Do you have anything worthwhile to contribute about the state of FX or just want to keep claiming the legacies will falter somehow. What if they don’t? You don’t know the answer to that but the stagnation and problems at FX are very real right now. I wouldn’t have even considered this job if I had even half the insite I do now.[/QUOTE]

Yes, the Pastal Contact has been a godsend for the last two decades. Day flying and fills up 30 MD-11's per day in volume. But the contract may be cut by 80% this fall. And then if true, FDX is waaay over staffed. Even with an early $500K buyout offers to the top seniority 60 year olds. Also, if you look around the system, FDX flies triple the birds than UPS. Eventually management is going to try to match that ratio. Not Good if your under 40 and junior. While AAL and others are hiring like no tomorrow and 50% of their pilots retiring next 5 years.

 

AAL is telling new hires that they will be WB CA within 5 years.

 

Over hiring was done. Unless there is a TA 2.0 this year with sugar for early retirements I predict a furlough. Especially if the Postal Contract is gutted. Remember, it fills 30 WB's daily. That is a lot of extra flying gone if the postmaster general wants to shrink it. UAL has 150 787's on order FYI.

 

that’s completely false I have buddies there that got hired 2 years ago that won’t see wb ca until the tail end of their career in a decent base nyc a bit sooner. Getting hired now almost certainly guarantees no wb ca but you can still get awarded nb ca in less than 2 years

 

I left for a legacy and couldn’t be happier. Happy to talk via PM if you want so we can skip the BS from Stan and his ilk.

 

Nuts that you can get NB CA at UAL. I’m in the same boat as OP that I’m junior, looking at watching the pension get stripped away with a divided retirement group, and NB future. I got a CJO and class date in less than a month. I’m looking for FDX to make one good move to galvanize my trust in them… but it’s just miss after miss when looking at management decisions.

 

My Brother is a 787 CA there. It is 100% true. This is what the new hires are being told in indoc. Get your facts straight.

 

Glad to know gossip is passed off as fact now. I guess we can expect to hit 7000 pilots some time this fall.

 

People stuck with this “I was hired in blah blah blah” mentality truly don’t understand that Fedex is going through a major transformational change in how it thinks and operates. The days of “love to fly airplanes” are gone. The OpEd has serious and legitimate concerns, although he went to Fedex making assumptions about the future, that is on him. The decline in volume is cyclical, it will rebound, that is not the main source of the root problems for the Fedex pilot group going forward. Yes, they over hired, which exacerbates the problem but should correct eventually. This is a short term problem.

The main problems which will affect the pilots most are the shift to moving the package the cheapest way possible vs mostly flying it, AND the loss of the postal volume, which will basically decimate the day sorts, drastically reduce domestic day flying. While I don’t think Fedex will shrink to the size of UPS, I do think it doesn’t take much to read all the information out there, financial disclosures, etc, to clearly see Express will shrink a fair amount. No one saw coming what UPS just did, offer a buyout to the most expensive pilots in order to rightsize the group. Fedex is acting more like the traditional UPS, fear mongering, scare tactics, trying to get people to leave on their own when it simply won’t happen en mass like they want to unless you incentivize people. A major shift in culture is going on, this is not the lost decade, not 1998, not 2000, not cyclical (not counting volume decline which is).

The junior folks at Fedex are faced with a no win situation. Stay and be stagnated for multiple years (length is anyone’s guess), or go to the big 4 after a major hiring wave and be at risk of any sort of downturn in the world (economy, another pandemic, whatever), plus seniority progression will not be anywhere near like someone hired in 2021, 2022 for example. Plus some may not even want to fly pax.

I have multiple friends at Fedex, two very junior, who don’t plan on leaving ‘cause they are too old and are resigned to the fact of being a permanent FO. The common theme amongst all of them: FDX pilot group is highly dysfunctional, very little unity, senior eat the junior for lunch, no cohesiveness, MEC leadership clueless. They say this is the hardest part to swallow. All the Fred non contractual leniency, kindness basically gone. It’s like working for UPS 🙄.

If you are 45 or younger, very tough decision. If older, you might as well ride it out. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side. One thing is clear: the Fred Fedex is gone. There were ups and downs with Fred, good and bad (I would guess mostly good), but the indu bean counter is in charge, with the help of the Atlas butcher, pressured by a board who only cares about money. This is the reality of corporate America, greed, money, profits over anything else. Don’t get me wrong, I am a true capitalist, but I do think the pendulum has swung way too far.

Legitimate concern, tough choice, no win situation. But I will agree, try to be happy even in the worst situations.