XJT news
 

A friend and former college buddy of mine informed me that some of our former graduates now employed by Express Jet that he keeps in touch with are concerned about furlough. Apparantly, Express Jet is in financial trouble and is considering asking employees for voluntary leaves of absence.

Since I heard this secondhand, can anyone elaborate on this?

Dude ...OLD news been on this board for a couple weeks.

Hmmm. I just went back two weeks and couldn't find a thread on the topic. Do you have a link?

It's on the main page of Airline Pilot Central. If you pull up the Expressjet page(the one with pay, hiring info, and new news) I believe it's at the top. At least it used to be.

No furlough worries, we were offered COLA's (Company Offered Leave of Absence). We retain seniority and longevity and keep our medical benefits and travel benefits. I requested one, but didn't get it since they went fairly senior. Mesaba and some other regionals have been doing this for months. We have let attrition take our numbers down. We are currently at 2800 pilots from 3100 last fall and we continually lose about 40 a month.

As for financial trouble, we are fine. Most of our business is profitable and our March load factor for our Branded flying was 73%, which we either broke even or made a profit. According to our SEC filing we are currently hedged at $2.40/gallon for 70% of our fuel in 2008, on our Branded side, where we pay for our own fuel. I'm not really worried at all.

I just flew with a guy that was on his last trip before his summer off. Kind of like the "summer of george".

A friend in training dept guessed next FO class might be Oct or Nov, but added that is only a guess. It could be sooner if numbers warrant.

Bingo!

I was pretty concerned about my job after the COLA announcement, but it's nice to know that we're down to 2800 pilots with 274 airframes. Right where we should be for now, though a couple bases are a bit overstaffed on the FO side (*cough*IAH*cough*). I think the COLA news made quite a few people jump ship, and I wouldn't be surprised if a good number of those taking the COLAs don't come back either. Buh-bye!

As a former XJTer (7 yrs ) I wish you all luck, but have doubts about this statement.

It's all in the SEC filings. And the recent Load Factor for March is part of the reason our stock has shot up this past week. Fuel won't affect us as much as others, we got a good guy in planning hedging right now.