That's been rebutted by management - I believe Mr. B in the training department, he said they wanted to keep fat on FO's and have a pool in case of some major hiring. Unless the folks in ATW are skilled at doublespeak, I don't think they know what is going on either.

But I have to say, if AWAC can't win an RFP from Midwest in MKE, with an ex-skyway CEO as CEO, the company is doomed.

Ask DM in DCA...he was one of the folks that went to ATL AirInc. Said they took resumes hand over fist in hopes of establishing a pool of over 200. That's not to say they don't always attend AirInc conferences and take a ton of resumes....

Big hiring pool for possible growth? Maybe? Big hiring pool for massive attrition following loss of "big grievance" and Midwest RFP? That's possible as well. I won't speculate on which of those two is more probable...;)

Would be refreshing to get a nice Christmas gift this year (from ATW or arbitrator or both), but as I said, I'm not holding my breath...

HAHA good point.

If we don't get this there will be big attrition. If we do get it we all move up. Win/Win situation kids.

Sitting in PIT right now. Why can't all airports be like this one!

See you guys in DCA!! :D

If we don't hear anything by the first week of December, I think I am going to officially give up hope. Damn... I WAS so optimistic!

According to our management, as of Nov. 10 we were still in the running for the Midwest Connect contract (as well as Delta and Frontier). This was part of the same internal announcement about the corporate flying, branded flying and the death of the Aviacsa deal.

I too heard in the conference call Expressjet was still in the running for Midwest flying, but isn't that contradictory to the statement made by management in a recorded phone message a couple months back saying they were eliminated because of a no-compete clause in EWR with Continental?

I don't recall the voice mail from a few months ago. But according to the written announcement to employees sent Nov. 14 we were still in it.

PS
Wouldn't the EWR problem be solved by just having Skyways use their DoJets to EWR? Or is that outside the capability.

If the Dork can do MKE-BDL, I'm sure it can do EWR.

Like I said, just curious...if AWAC doesn't win the Midwest RFP, I certainly hope XJT does.

The issue Midwest had with XJT is that XJT cannot operate other than COEX flights into a CAL hub (EWR, CLE, and IAH) when they are still doing >50% of the feeder service for CAL.

I think after review of AWAC's inflight service, Midwest proably asked XJT to resubmit a proposal. Their aircraft are much cleaner than AWAC's. This doesn't bode well for AWAC IMO.

That being said, if you've seen XJT's #'s they look a lot cheaper at first ($1,161/block hour), but they assume a reduced fuel cost program for JetA (they paid $0.66/gal in 1Q 2006). I have a hunch they won't be paying that for flying outside of the CAL system. When you average that with the cost AWAC pays for gas, they are only about $160/block hour cheaper (although still significant, not as significant as the #'s make them appear to be).

There's no question that AWAC is ~10% more expensive and offers less quality. Unfortunately, for AWAC pilots at this time that means no growth. That's just the way it is.

But ask yourself this - who needs to place those 10 planes? AWAC or XJT? XJT needs homes, AWAC already has a place for their aircraft for another 8.5 years.