Eagle was a "career carrier" making 100-120K/yr? Your generation made it a career carrier for who? For yourselves at the top that's who. Mainline would have flown those airplanes for the respectable captain rates that we have, but would not subject future hires for 35K/yr indefinitely so they rejected the rates. Guess who said yes to those rates, your generation. Your generation set up the pay structure that we currently operate under so you can fly shiny jets. You justify it under the guise of paying your dues. Great, now we're paying our dues on 50/70 seater jets instead of metroliners, now that you're at AA, I guess you can play the same game with 320s and 737s, newhires top out at $50 because we need to pay our dues, and it's our fault that we come to work under a scale that you signed off on. Your reasoning is total garbage.
"Many preferred to stay and how could you blame them ?*In their 40's and 50's with kids in college, many simply couldn't leave Eagle just to help the company out of...........yep, another jam they created for themselves. "

I'm not blaming them that they're staying, but to have the balls to use what leverage we have to demand an exit package instead of using it to gain contractual improvements to the pilots who are here is shows the selfishness of your entitlement generation. How is this a jam that the company created? By them paying you the wages that you negotiated and are a slave to now?

You keep saying we want to turn this place into an upgrade mill. I personally don't give a crap about the upgrade. My QOL is AWESOME as it is, they pay raise I'd get or PIC time I would get isn't worth a quarter of the QOL I'd be giving up. If I worked at AA I wouldn't mind if I was an FO for the rest of my life because they pay respectable wages. At Eagle, your generation created this wage disparity under the guise of paying your dues and now you're blaming others for wanting to upgrade. Jeeesh, take a little responsibility.

 

Pure manure.

We made it a career carrier for those who planned to stay and paid their dues. It took 15 years or more for most. We DIDN'T make it a career for those simply interested in getting their PIC time and splitting and thus NOT paying their dues there. Those are the parasites who are only interested in sucking the sap out of the place and splitting before they have to smell the waste they left behind. It doesn't surprise me to see you can't comprehend my reasoning. Obviously, you couldn't care less about Eagle being a long-term career oriented company, just a disposable vehicle to get you to somewhere else.

Of course, that's why Eagle has now become the toilet it is.

It's not senior pilots demanding anything. It's ALPA trying to grease their own wheels going somewhere else (mid-seniority pilots). Those senior are simply saying, "I'm staying unless their is some incentive to go elsewhere". It was characters like you that cheered the loudest when ALPA tried to throw those senior under the bus and require them to decide to flow before they even got an AA class date. It was characters like you who hooted and howled when ALPA came up with the "Dear Eric" campaign to find jobs for those senior at other carriers. "Just gimme my upgrade, so I can split", they cried..............

If your QOL is "awesome", what are you whining on this forum for ?

Get off your broken soapbox and stop attempting to demand others accomodate your interests. What you want out of a career may not be what another wants. Jeeesh, take a little responsibility for yourself and stop blaming everyone else for your awsome quality of life, would you ?

 

eaglefly, you lack a business understanding. I bet you think that its ok to have all these federal entitlements like oh say the PBGC, and its ok to run around with a 16+ trillion debt that is increasing by 1 trillion a year! As long as you get your medicare and SSI and PBGC, then your happy because you got your own.

The second you make a REGIONAL a high paying career destination, someone creates an upstart with new employees system wide and they come and compete. Suddenly you either take cuts to compete or go away. Seems to be in every industry in this country. We are labor. Now Eagle faces the problem that they are expensive, and either they can fix that or someone like Mesa, gojet, or TSA will take the flying at 20% less rates.

Same reason Southwest and other low costs eat into mainline flying so easily. Just wait till someone pulls it off successfully on an international scale.

 

Again with the "paying dues", how about this, if I get the company to agree to $150 CA scale and top out FO at $20 under the guise newbies need to pay their dues, does that make it right? That's exactly what you guys did. Everyone on property was promised with the jet growth plans, they'd be on the CA scale in no time. Thus selling out everyone after them.

How do you know what my long-term goal is? My plan is to retire at Eagle unless something else come up. I really have no desire to do heavy international flying. I'd even be happy to top out at a CA scale of $85 if we can get the FO scale up to $55 thus taking a paycut to something more fair and equitable. Undo this garbage your selfish take take take generation has created.

"We made it a career carrier for those who planned to stay and paid their dues."

Guess what, most of those people like yourself never stayed, they either went somewhere else or flowed after reaping the benefits of the flopsided payscale at the expense of the next generation.


Precisely because my QOL is awesome, I have more time than I know what to do with.

 

What does this have to do with Eagle ?

It seems you've cooked up a strawman argument to give yourself some credibility. I ran two business on the side each of which made me more money then my Eagle salary (1 since sold). To come on an internet forum and claim you know all about someone else simply based on posting here is laughable, even more so considering your junior status at Eagle itself.

Please.

Eagle is no different then the majority of other regional carriers in regards to pay, scheduling, etc. Eagle's theoretical problem is pilot longevity (seniority) which is seen by managment as the deficiency in the "cost" side of their equation. I say theoretical in that it is simply something to target by management.

Eagle is expensive ?

Perhaps you should read the 10-K filings where the CEO represents Eagle's costs as competitive.

The forumula you are trying to validate is the exact forumla airline managments across the board use to drive labor costs downward (you should shoot your resume in to Centreport). Pilot-wise it's a formula only beleived by easily led suckers. It costs A LOT of money nowadays to start an airline and the risks in this environment are extremely high, like getting financing, the limitations of slots and facilities at airports, penetrating markets, infrastructure, contracts, etc.

All AMR wants to do is eliminate their disadvantage of longevity. Problem with that is, if carriers like Eagle get more and larger RJ's, that eats more mainline jobs away as those carriers shrink. If anyone buys into the baloney your doling out here on this, future pilots will simply be enablers in a philosophy of undercutting themselves based on fear of the unknown.

Sounds like you've already swallowed that lure, hook, line and sinker and no offense, but I don't think you have any idea of what you're talking about.

Again, I see your not only advocating a race to the bottom, you see it as necessary. Again, it's sad this is the new breed of pilot coming into the profession nowadays. As such, I see little hope for the future and thankfully, by the time guys like you are wallowing in your own creation, I can watch from a comfortable spot on the sidelines.

BTW, you DO know SWA has hands down the HIGHEST pilot pay for narrowbody passenger aircraft in the U.S., yes ?

In many cases, by a large margin.

 

Dude.........you really need to get a grip. "Us" guys didn't do a damn thing. ALPA negotiated Eagle's contract and they're mid-seniority. Additionally, as stated before Eagle's pay is in the middle of the pact, competition wise.

Are you like your pal in advocating Eagle take further pay cuts to............well, what on god's earth ARE you talking about ?

For a guy who states his QOL is awesome and that he couldn't care less about upgrade, you're all over the place in the opposite direction.

If your plan is truly to retire at Eagle, you'd think you'd be making the opposite argument and claims and holding firm on the best compensation contract possible, so you have something when you've paid those dues. Instead you're doing the exact opposite bellyaching about how those prior to you screwed you out of something by doing the exact thing you should be supporting...........but glaringly are not.

Sorry.......I just can't buy this bill of goods.

Idle hands are the devil's workshop.

 

if you think SWA pay will stay your nuts, they are already getting close to losing money, and when it sticks, that will be the first thing to go. High pay is great when your growing and have tons new hires and low paid employees to balance it. When you stop hiring and growing, and everything catches up, then it hits home, and the cuts come. In 5 years I bet they are no where near the top anymore. Nice try though.

 

I don't want the best compensation for myself, I want a fair and equitable compensation for the pilot group as a whole. Making 100K vs 85K after taxes is about what? 8K take home difference after fed,med,ss,state,etc taxes. It's really spit. I'd rather take a paycut and see the money goes to a coworker that's more underpaid. Heck, after 20 years here, I get 100% of 8% match. That's an extra 8K extra in compensation alone, about 4 months of new hire pay.

Anyways, so now you're at your AA, you'd have no problem then for me to use the same logic your generation used then right? Since I only want to do domestic flying.

Eagle CA flies A320 for what you guys would do it for -$10/hr while new hires subsidizing the costs by topping out at $40/hr. This would be GREAT for ME, but I would never endorse it because I don't have the ME ME ME attitude like your generation.

 

Like YOUR generation? How is it that every generation that follows feels they own the moral superiority card? Don't you see the irony of just such a statement? C'mon, man. I'm sure you're a nice guy in the crew lounge and in the cockpit, so why not keep it civil on a forum?

 

I made no assumptions about what will happen with SWA in the future.......unlike you. It seems assumption is your forte, though. I've been in the industry 2.5 decades, through multiple contracts, the gulf war, 9/11, mergers and at 2 full-blown cycles and I haven't got the future pegged. Here you are, a 20-something regional pilot, probably 5 years out of a 172 flight line and you've got it all figured out.

At first glance, it's halarious, but upon deeper investigation, it's quite scary. God, some of the new kids these days.................