It's not better than your regional?

 

Pay needs to come up in a big way. Other than that there isn't really anything I'd change with this place. The pilots and flight attendants are all good people. Maintenance is just as good as any legacy airline. Flying is same, we stay at same standard of hotel as all the legacy pilots, and there are several things in our contract that are better than the bigger airlines. Pay me in line with my buddies at other airlines and I can't find any real reason to leave. But until then my apps are still out.

 

I apologize if this has been touched on, but are you guys looking to increase retirement to be more competitive with the legacies at all?

 

Yes

.............

 

You don't need to apologize, you need to read the thread.

However, to expand on this, to use history as a gauge I am curious how the contract compared at the time in 2010. I know you guys worked hard and it took a lot of time and effort to get that contract - in the end how did it compare to the legacies in pay, retirement, work rules? Obviously conditions are very different now at the legacies. Is the gap simply something that developed as they improved their contracts while Spirit's stayed the same?

 

Well you have to look at history. There are many many differences but one is retirment. It's easy for legacies to get a 16% DC plan. THEY USED TO HAVE PENSIONS. It will be a lot harder for us to "negotiate" that because our current retirment is the best Spirits ever had etc......

 

I'm not so sure I would call it easy. That was a rough process switching from the pensions to the current DC plans. UAL, for example, wrote off almost $10B in pension liability in bankruptcy, and $3.2B of that was not insured. That's three billion dollars of United employee retirement that evaporated with the flick of a pen. I think there's some historical relevance in that related to where they are now with their retirement plans.

Anyway, I've tried finding CBA's from around that time but haven't had much luck. I found the UAL CBA signed in December of 2012 shows 5-year A320 pay rates at $115/$179 (FO/CA), while the APC page for UAL shows $149/$233. Pay has clearly gone up a lot in a short time there (and other places), so I am just curious how Spirit's CBA overall compared six years ago when the legacies were losing money after/during a recession and a wave of bankruptcies and mergers.

 

Really? How many inflight shutdowns/fires have the legacys had over the last 4 years?

You're kidding yourself.

 

Well I don't know, guy that trolls random airline threads, how many? And how many have we had and what is the ratio? Go ahead...

 

I think our MX is very good.

I have to assume Managment likes to run the mx on a tight budget and the guys and girls in the mx department do a good job.

These are MX workers working without a hangar, in the extreme cold and extreme heat.

I would love to see them unionize down the road.