Agreed but the dynamic is different now with the crazy hiring and poaching being done by the legacies. It’s gonna take more than pay to fix this. Pay+Benefits+XYZ. Can F9 afford it in the long term is the real question.

Oh I have no doubt they can afford it. My concern is do they *want* to afford it? Or, is it cheaper to cash out on their investment and reinvest their earnings in a new and cheaper venture? That keeps me up at night more than this place shrinking into oblivion. Them getting rid of us could be reasonably pain free, or it could mean we’re all unemployed. However, like I said in another thread, the current hiring environment takes away some of the anxiety of door #2. I really don’t want to start over again if I don’t have to, but if F9 were to suddenly cease to exist, all 1700 of us would probably have a pitty job offer from a legacy within a month.

Yeah, same thoughts as well. F9 has two valuable commodities, pilots and planes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the merger rumors with Spirit finally come true as a result of this turmoil. What a ULCC juggernaut that’d be and it might just attract new hires and slow attrition. The idea of it is more appealing now than ever.

I don't see how a merger helps anything. In fact, it probably muddies the waters...

What prospective candidate wants to join would be a larger, low paying airline that has to merge seniority lists and all the turmoil associated.

The place sucks over here and sucks over there. A merger just creates a bigger suck...

I think we do merge with Spirit someday, but I don't think it's imminent.

There would be benefits and economies of scale to a merger in addition to them not needing to compete

Regardless, if there was a messy seniority list integration occurring, I don't think it would keep people from applying. They know they would be the bottom of the list no matter what. Why would they care how the integration played out? The bottom is the bottom.

If Indigo wanted to sell or merge or anything they wouldn’t be behaving in the manor they are. Closing ORD makes no other sense then to save money, fill ATL, and have reserves for Summer schedule. They’re gonna knock us down until the last second when they need to actually grow and they’ll offer cents on the dollar hoping we’ll be knocked down and desperate enough to take anything. In this case though, I think they went too far and it will come back to bite them.

Indigo’s and managements actions would have zero impact on a merger or acquisition. Another airline wouldn’t have been tripping over themselves because Frontier had a couple of common use gates in T5 for a couple of hours in the morning and evening. Another airline or investment firm also wouldn’t care how management is treating its pilots. If anything, I would argue that management’s recent actions would make us more attractive to a possible buyer: The fat is trimmed, we’re financially leaner, and pilot bases are staffed. Face it, ORD just wasn’t winning any awards for base of the year from a financial or practical standpoint. I was based there for years and I’m very, very sad to see it go, but it’s was a sad reality. Indigo just wasn’t willing to pony up the money for more gates in the expanded T5.

Unfortunately pilots make horrible airline managers. History has proven that. There have been a good number of pilot created and run airlines throughout history, none of them still exist. There are far more to running an airline than 99 percent of us understand.

Frontier isn’t going to disappear, and all of us be out of a job. Indigo is way to smart for that! They know exactly the financial state of the company, and will sale or merge before going under. I don’t agree with what and how they do things, but they are very smart financially.
my 2 cents

Haha some interesting stuff on here. My question might not even matter in the long term if the merger being discussed is true. I just moved to FL for one of the start-up LCCs and they are closing down my base and apparently another base in a month. I have still decided the LCC life is still for me and my family. I just want to just a more established carrier. Anyways, I am blessed to have a couple of interviews coming up this month with some LCCs… Wanted to know y’all’s honest opinion… Who has the better contract, F9 or NK? I know NK has a lot of schedule flexibility including the ability to drop to 0 hours as well as a min 4 days off between trips for line holders. Does F9 have anything similar? If so, can you be specific? F9’s nearest FL base is about a 20 minute drive to work for me and NK’s is about a 90 minute drive. Is NK’s contract worth the extra hour on my commute? Thanks.

Congrats on the interviews! The correct answer of where to go is whichever one hires you.

To answer your questions, the contracts are a wash. NK has some things we don’t, we have some things they don’t. For example spirit has 321 override (variable based on 320 to 321 block hours). We pay 125% for any credit over 82 hours for the month. Spirit is straight pay regardless of credit hours.

Our scheduling flexibility and ability to manipulate our schedule at F9 is great. No, you can’t drop to zero like Spirit. However, if that’s important to you I would caution you of this: You don’t just ask and it’s done at NK. The availability and coverage has to be there in order to drop to zero. With the short staffed situation that both NK and F9 are about to face, I’d venture to say that dropping down to zero will be next to impossible going forward.

All things being equal with an offer from both I’d say take the shorter drive.