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05-06-2020, 03:45 PM

#41

Chris99

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Joined APC: Jan 2007

Position: B717 CA

Posts: 447

Quote:

Originally Posted by hawkerpilot05

That is wrong. About 1.3 billion was aircraft write offs. Warren doesn't loan you money. He allows you to use Berkshire Hathaway as a guarantee on your loans for a fee so you can go out and borrow money. It was never publicly disclosed how much we borrowed. You could have read a lot about it on the Alice Schroeder blog site but she took it down. Another interesting fact is prior to the meltdown, we never had to pay a fee. Alice was surprised we were given this status. After Sokol came on board, he started paying that fee.

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Well, a loan or a guarantee, whatever you want to call it, I remember management being excited enough to communicate to the pilots when they had paid the entire $1.9 billion back to BH. I was always amazed at how quickly they paid it back despite them constantly complaining about being strapped for cash and not being able to afford any QOL increases for pilots.

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05-06-2020, 06:42 PM

#42

hawkerpilot05

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Joined APC: Mar 2015

Posts: 201

The company never said loan. It was debt. We wrote down 1.3 billion as debt for parked airplanes. Then when we got rid of them, that debt was gone. How else do you think the debt was paid off so fast? Otherwise we must have really been raking in the money to pay off a 1.9 billion dollar loan off so quickly and then going forward would add up to be a lot of money.

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05-06-2020, 08:22 PM

#43

jtf560

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Joined APC: May 2006

Posts: 1,024

Quote:

Originally Posted by hawkerpilot05

They were raking money- those airplanes they sold off at the bottom of the used aircraft market were not worth 1.3 billion. I doubt that all the airplanes disposed over the last 11 or so years brought back 1.3 billion combined. We ride those things hard and a lot of that time was a horrible used market at least partially bad because of the sheet number of airplanes we turn over. I do understand there was a shell game over the numbers to make RS look bad and DS look good, but there was also a lot of new aircraft sales and profits from operations while paying us a lot less before the 2015 contract. Even after the 2015 contract they continued to rake it in and paid the dividends.

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05-07-2020, 05:56 AM

#44

hawkerpilot05

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Joined APC: Mar 2015

Posts: 201

They didn't have to sell the aircraft at the write off price to recoup the money used in the write down for the debt if I remember correctly. The removal of the asset erases the write down asset price going toward the debt. We did have around a 600 million loss or so, but as you said, we recovered from that.

With that said, things were not going that well with Operations until the 2018 IBB. No it looks like voting in the 2018 CBA was the best thing we did. Sure is nice having the 30k signing bonus in the bank for a rainy day.

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05-07-2020, 08:00 PM

#45

ASACapt

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Joined APC: Dec 2005

Posts: 285

Quote:

Originally Posted by MinRest

Given his recent decisions on aviation companies, I would be slightly concerned if I worked for NJA. Not to say he will sell or dump NJA, but his willingness to help NJA this time might not be there. Luckily it appears that as of now, that help isn’t needed yet.

I have zero worry he’ll sell us. We’ve been paying him a pretty return for a while and we’re debt free. What other aviation company can say that?

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05-07-2020, 09:16 PM

#46

MinRest

Mmmm wine

Joined APC: Feb 2020

Position: A220 FO

Posts: 945

Quote:

Originally Posted by ASACapt

I have zero worry he’ll sell us. We’ve been paying him a pretty return for a while and we’re debt free. What other aviation company can say that?

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Makes NJA worth less. A lack of assets and debt to leverage makes them a risk to loan money to which is why BH had to do it last time.

05-09-2020, 10:51 AM

#47

hawkerpilot05

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Joined APC: Mar 2015

Posts: 201

Quote:

Originally Posted by MinRest

Makes NJA worth less. A lack of assets and debt to leverage makes them a risk to loan money to which is why BH had to do it last time.

BH does this with all their companies. It allows them to get a very low interest rate. An interesting fact though is that prior to Sokol coming on board, we never had to pay the fee to BH. Alice Schroeder mentioned in her blog site that she had never heard of this before. Obviously Warren believe in RTS so much he waived the fee so RTS could build the company. There was a lot of good information on her blog site when all this was going down when Sokol ran us but she has taken it down.

In the end, it probably was the best thing for RTS to get replaced as once his no compete cause ended he started up a helicopter leasing business he then sold to GE for 1.3 billion while Sokol got canned from BH for unethical behavior.

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