Originally Posted by iPilot

I could very well see Southwest or other single-fleet LCC's just skipping the grants and going straight to furlough. For example Southwest would have minimal training impact and could argue that its better to preserve its cash and quickly shrink so that it will be in position to capture market share on the other side.

On the other hand you have the Legacies with complex fleets, even more complex union contracts to navigate and extremely poor cash situations. In their case it might be a necessity to take all the money they can get just to avoid liquidation in a matter of weeks. However, I'm sure the legal teams are pouring over the legalese of the loans and grants to look for every available loophole.

Lastly, they could be using this no-furlough time-out to retrain and prepare the pilot group for what comes Oct. 1. For instance they can run a displacement bid throwing every potential furlough onto the junior fleet with a class date of October. They sit out the summer and when the airline is legally able to they just furlough those guys. Everyone else gets retrained over this summer as much as possible. Depending on how desperate the situation at the major the displacement and retraining might not even be done by then but you just work with what you got and try to save as much money along the way as possible.

Finally, and this really is the worst case scenario: they go bust. They renege on the terms of the grants and use the courts to rip their contracts to shreds and just do what they want. What's Congress going to do, demand its money back? It would not be a tough argument to make that the viability of Delta, United, AA will hinge on being able to lay off outside the seniority list to save training costs. The union would cry to high heaven of course but behind closed doors if they're presented with the alternative being oblivion, they might just have to take it. Lets hope not!