H46Bubba

They're from the line, but are in lease return condition, which means thay have the original engines and whatever is required by the leassor.

H46Bubba

The only aircraft that still belong to Comair go to VCV until sold. All the others are lease returns and no longer belong to Comair as soon as the aircraft is delivered to wherever their final destination is.

TurboDog

So have we determined if the correct amount of airframes are still in service. If not, why don't we do anything about it. You know the main reason that management doesn't follow our contract, it because we let them get away with it everytime.

mumu

Regardless of where you live, your “tax home” is where you are BASED. Expenses you incur are deductible only if outside your “tax home”. IRS Publication 463 has several pages dedicated to this subject. If you take this deduction and are audited by the IRS, you will lose. Unless this is a temporary assignment you can't deduct a crashpad.

Publication 463 (2008), Travel, Entertainment, Gift, and Car Expenses

irrelevant

The point is not just how much you can deduct. It's still capital out the window. It's like a savings account where you deposit $100, but when you check the balance available for withdrawal, there's only $15 there.

"Congratulations" on getting your effective tax rate down to 10%. I put that in quotations because many of us are so focused on paying as little tax as possible that we spend a lot of money in the process. The mortgage interest deduction, for example, is something many homeowners think is great. They adjust their gross income by subtracting out the amount of interest they paid on their mortgage during the tax year...effectively allowing them to earn the amount of money they spent on mortgage interest tax free. In the end though, someone who earned $35,000 and paid $10,000 in interest ($25,000 a.g.i.) only "saved" $1747 in federal tax liability.

That doesn't mean one shouldn't own a house. It is merely to try to illustrate that tax deductions come with a price that is generally much higher than the money saved in the end. Net worth suffers as a result of focusing exclusively on tax reduction, as it does with completely ignoring tax implications.

I am not a fan of getting money back from the government because I overpaid throughout the prior tax year, but that's another topic.

In summary, spending $5000 on work related tax deductions when one is in the 15% tax bracket to begin with will only "save" someone 15% of $5000...or $750. That's a pretty poor return on investment, from my perspective.

I am not writing this to argue with one of my respected colleagues. We have contract negotiations coming up in a couple of years, and the more impoverished our pilot group is, the more likely we are to accept anything that Atlanta suggests is "fair". It is in our collective interest for every individual here to have as strong a balance sheet as possible when entering those negotiations.

A few of us like to consider ourselves "better", "superior", etc. to Mesa pilots, but at the end of the year, a commuting Comair Pilot is going to finish with less wealth than a CVG domiciled, non-commuting Mesa pilot (if there is such a thing).

If a moderator drops in on this I'll say in advance that the financial impact on Comair crews forced to relocate in order to maintain employment is the seed from which this discussion has evolved. Pilots who in the future may consider Comair as a prospective employer (if Delta ever elects to invest in Comair's future) may benefit from this discussion.

evilboy

sorry my friend, no luck. h46bubba was trying to help, but no luck. I'll PM you later with an idea I have.

RiddleEagle18

here ya go! Canadair CRJ-100 Production List - Planespotters.net Just Aviation You can click on comair and get a more detailed list.

H46Bubba

It's especially important now, because of the 6 that went to Pinnacle, Mesaba, ASA, and SkyWest. They're not considered lease returns.

RiddleEagle18

how are these planes getting moved around? Chief Pilots doing most of it or are they going out to reserves??

Boomer

Ditto what TD said...

Who has the list of Comair aircraft on March 2, 2007 and checks them off as Delta gives them away? We can only lose 10% of the 50s that we had on that date.

We lost several 50s in December and we're losing a dozen more this month: 6 to other DCIs, and apparently a half dozen in YYZ. And these are just the ones we've heard of.

Who has the list of lease returns and verifies our losses against that list?

Or is our shrinking fleet too trivial for ALPA to focus on?