I just read that Jazz is going to start flying 757s... for once Republic is not leading the pack in the demise of mainline pay... although I'm sure some at Republic are drooling...

On the whole seat issue, You can't just take the seat out and call it good. If the Plane was designed from the factory to have a hundred seats, then the pay has to be a hundred seats, the only way I can see it being different is if a first class is available. The First class would make it impossible to implicate a hundred seats. Therefore the pay would have to based upon the maximum amount of seats that could be installed. So if they took out that one seat, there would have to be something in its place (ie closet.)

Basically, management's case rests entirely on the fact that the 100th seat was never "held out" for sale to the public. It is installed, it is depicted in our manuals, and the fact that maintenance has deactivated the seat implies that it is was seat in the first place. What this case will boil down to is the definition of a seat in the RAH CBA. Yes, our payscales are foolishly tied to seat count. However, no one ever took the time to explicitly define whether pay was based on seats installed, seats available for service, or seats available for sale. I guess no one ever really though that the word "seat" needed to be explained. Every contract has ambiguities, but making the word seat a gray area is something no one expected.

Its stuff like this that really raises my blood pressure. How can anyone say the RAH guys were stupid for not defining how their pay scales were determined. As said above, nobody would have imagined the number of seats would have to be defined in a CBA but look where we are. In the end those planes will be flying for months if not years before this all gets sorted out, undoubtedly in management's favor.

I hate lawyers.

I can say they are stupid. I said it in 2003 while the vote was going on. You never base pay on something that can be altered. Pay should be based on specific aircraft or max certified ramp weight. Want to know something else I told the EXCO back in 2003. FO pay rates were a joke and the quick upgrades won't last forever.

Is there any provision for retro pay if the judge decides that the 100th seat does in fact exist?

I mean technically RAH pilots would be doing months of work that they aren't getting paid for.

Fair enough, I'm just sick of airlines being able to get away with murder by finding rediculous loop holes in the contract. My disdain for them is only second to the lawyers we hire to write these contracts that end up getting ripped apart anyway.

You have to look at the Type Certificate Data Sheet. It will list the amount of seats that can be installed. Typically, it lists a range of seats so you can add or subtract as many as you want and its still legal. If you look at the TCDS for Challengers you will see that certain models like the 605 can have up to 19 seats but typically you see around 9-10 (including a devan) installed.

Truer words have never been said. What I don't understand is why pilot groups can't hire competent lawyers to review their contract proposals...this is too often a recurring theme, and not just at regionals.

I can't recall..do alpa/teamsters national hire a professional law firm for contracts, or do they have some good-old-boy in-house counsel who's too drunk to hold a real job somewhere else?

Many times they have in house attorney's but most hire additional outside counsel.
3 problems.
1. Need to hire professional negotiators, not pilots. Pilots are too much of control freaks to think that there are other people who can do a better job at anything than themselves.
2. Pilots are too cheap to pay for representation on par with what management uses against us.
3. Most pilots aren't bright enough to look past pay rates and see that the compensation chapter is probably the least important chapter in most contracts.