I like that, I am going to borrow that phrase.

 

It wouldn’t have been on its own, we would already be the super ULCC Frontierit (Though anecdotally every pilot here who has been here 5+ years all say the same thing about both mergers: We would prefer to remain just Spirit and go it alone). Management has taken their foot off the gas since whenever they started the secret merger plotting with F9, and had that not gone through it wouldn’t have surprised me to see our board make some c-suite changes as most agree they have been phoning it in since covid.

 

Thats exactly what I said though, the Net profits are what dividends are paid from and profit sharing is a part of that (the slice of the pie). Looking back at B6 net profits for the ten years prior to covid the numbers vary wildly, but averaged to 420 million. Let’s say combined with Spirit they average double that, 840 million, heck call it a billion. So 15% of net profits is $150 million, divided among 8000 pilots is $18,750 each. Schedule flexibility can easily earn me that $1562 a month.

Now I’m not going to turn down a check for that, but that’s also predicated on management running the company to produce a billion dollar net annual profit, which they’ve done only once in the last 12 years, maybe ever (I only looked back to 2010).

Sure this is a good time to get language, and yeah maybe some point a decade or two down the line they may figure out a way to churn profits of several billion, but we need to buy a lot of planes and gates and equipment and staff etc to get there. Of course all of us who’ve been doing this a while know we are just another phugoid cycle away from some industry event. My main point is not that I don’t want profit sharing, but rather being very pragmatic about what size checks we can expect to see in the short-medium term vs what we horse trade for the language.

 

This just isn't an "this or that" situation. It's an "and" situation. Profit sharing is industry standard, and should be in the JCBA along with ("and") the QOL items we all want. We hold the keys to the single operating certificate, there is no merger without our blessing on a JCBA. The fact that you think checks will be modest, is yet another reason to NAIL DOWN THE LANGUAGE NOW, as if it comes at a lower cost to them, then it shouldn't be that hard to attain.


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And THAT needs to be drilled into the heads of everyone in the pilot group. This isn’t a typical CBA negotiation. It will for some a once in a career event where management is actually harmed by dragging out negotiations rather than benefitted. It is leverage that these two pilot groups may never see again. This is not a time to moderate our expectations or to think short term.

 

You're totally right. There’s no reason that we can’t have both. No reason we can’t have profit sharing and our DTZ with applicable rules. Once in a lifetime opportunity here to make post merger JB an airline with both high pay and great QOL. Let’s hope our respective unions listen to us and doesn’t blow it.

 

Hopefully this time they’ll hold out until AFTER the majority pilot group gets their “I’m mad lanyards” before capitulating while trying to convince us that “We didn’t really have the leverage we claimed a few weeks earlier, and we got 2 out of 3 items we went after and we got it wrapped up super quick aren’t you happy?”

 

Exactly. We should only make progress in this negotiation. Going backwards on any aspect of either of our contracts in this environment would be grounds for recalling committee members, imo.

 

Hopefully the learned from United’s Tumi TA fiasco and that won’t be necessary.

 

That is a Double Bingo.