Today marks the end of an era. Casper is no more!

Apparently it failed some sort of stress test and will not be returned to service.

 

 

Casper? Is that N407SW?

 

Regarding Envoy ground services, Mesa just hired one of Envoy's gate people to track all the delays they cause us.

 

That's pretty interesting. I don't think we will learn much more than we already know though.

 

Facebiter, is that you?

A lot of people were dreading this and claiming we'd lose our benefits completely. Not a very realistic scenario, especially when half the employees wouldn't be able to get to work and all our flights would cancel. It'll be cool when there's more than a smiley face to let us know the loads.

Good riddance. Satan will enjoy it in hell. One guy said he heard the earlier arbitration about 50-seat Captain pay was contingent upon us actually having a 200, though I've heard that's not the case more frequently. To get to the bottom of it I dug into the contract, but I can't actually find any mention of training/vacation/deadheading/etc. being paid at 50-seat rates. Could someone direct me to the correct section or paragraph?

But in the course of looking through it, I found this little bit:
So how does that work with paying for EFB's? I know it was optional earlier, but isn't it mandatory for all newhires now?

 

I'm not sure about that part in the contract, but in the most recent conference call with the MEC, the reps said it doesn't matter whether or not we have the 200 in regards to captain pay.

Supposedly the language in the contract says that captains get a "base pay" (which is what a captain would be paid flying the 200), for training events, deadheads, reserve, etc. It doesn't specifically mention anything about having a 200 on property means that captains will get paid that amount. So even though 407 is out to pasture, captains will still be getting paid the crap "base pay" if they're doing anything but flying the 76/79 seaters.

 

Exactly. A "common sense" interpretation of our contract, conducted by an average human being on planet Earth, would very likely presume that a pilot based in Houston--who is only qualified to fly a 76-seater--would be paid guarantee, vacation, sick time, etc. on 76-seat payrates. Because, well, we only fly 76-seaters and are not qualified to fly anything else currently on property but 76-seat Embraers.

However, lawyers and arbitrators do not read contracts from the perspective of ordinary humans like us, and while something such as this seems readily obvious to an average Joe, they've decided that "base pay" means "the lowest paying jet equipment category that has ever been operated by Mesa since the CBA was signed."

Because it is not explicitly stated to the contrary, the arbitrator determined that equipment-specific payrates are only effective in an operational sense--i.e. those are the rates you get when actually flying that specific aircraft.

Language (or lack thereof) can be twisted to mean many things no one ever considered. Our current contract is one of the most bare-bones documents I have ever seen, because, well, it was signed with the "bankruptcy gun" to everyone's head.

I hope I don't tick off any CRJ Captains by saying this, but any junior IAH Captain who likes the EJet (and/or lives in IAH) should feel lucky that arbitrator decision went the way it did--if base pay were variant-specific, the CRJ Captains would've had a very, very strong argument to bid over to EJet CA. Lots of us would be nowhere close to IAH Captain at the moment if it had gone the other way, IMHO.

 

Interesting. So it isn't ever explicitly spelled out in the contract. Blows my mind. Either Mesa has the world's greatest lawyers or ALPA has the worst.

 

The way it was explained to me by one of the MEC officers is that the TA was annotated with the term "base pay" when it was signed and ratified but that term never made it into the final product that was printed after ratification. It was on the basis that the parties signed the TA that the arbitrator found that "base pay" was what everyone had agreed to.