Finally someone gets it
 

In the Seattle Times this week.

Snoozing bagage handler: You get what you pay for
Wakeup call: Alaska Airlines outsourced baggage handling to save money, cutting hundreds of in-house jobs, a move that may have come back to bit them in the snooze heard around the world...

Remember the reaction from ALPA when Bill "replaced" about 500 IAM members to save a few bucks and the Menzies guys started tagging the cargo holds with gang graffiti? Yawn... "ALPA pilots could never be replaced by non-union workers... we have a gentlemen's agreement they would never..."

Wake up MEC!

How often do 73's takeoff above max landing weight? Is it likely they had to dump gas in this situation?

737s can't dump fuel. But we do take off over max landing weight quite often. Many flights are planned to land at max landing weight. Cutting corners or unforcast tailwinds can require us to drop the gear early and/or drag around the pattern with gear and flaps just to burn fuel and get below max landing weight. Another in a long list of excellent design "features."

So dumping it would be cheaper?

The reason there isn't much of a traditional APC furball over how Delta caused this, and over how Alaska can go to Juno anythime it wants to, is that sadly, we're all victims of outsourcing to some extent. If it's not the people that load the bags, it's the people that pretend to clean the lavs...

Pretending to clean the lavs got a chuckle. That was funny. However, cultural differences, on a china trip we came out to the plane and in the 777 there are 2 lavs just outside the cockpit. There was this mid 30s chinese woman scrubbing those lavs out. Up to her armpits in lav cleaning. I was gob smacked in a good way. Her "mission" was to make those lavs spotless.

Much respect for her diligence, and gratitude for her work.