That would fit with Pedro's "vision" and his touting that 170 would only be a MINIMUM fleet guarantee and how he wants to grow Eagle errr Envoy in the future... buuut threatening to shrink us if we vote down the TA... makes sense? Those planes gotta go somewhere... good luck Mesa!

 

What the industry better realize is that if a regional like Eagle gets shut down, a very large number of pilots will not be able to return to the industry and start over from scratch, thereby turning a pilot pay problem into a real pilot shortage problem.

 

management knows that, they are banking on FEAR to overcome the pay issue and for a vote in favor of management proposal in the TA of concessions for a lot of maybes.

matter a fact the fleet commitment and the flow commitment, in order to honor one (with a pilot shortage) they would have to violate the other commitment. So management already knows which they are going to violate, the one that costs the least, and that would be the flow will be stalled to a crippling crawl to maintain the staffing for the 170 aircraft.

 

I think this would work: Keep the work rules the same. Double everyone's pay. Give every Envoy pilot an AA employee number.

 

Maybe yes maybe no. Our current eight year contract doesn't have any provisions against such a problem.

If we are able to secure language such as "it will reduce block hours to honor the flow" we can always take it to arbitration in case that they decide to violate the provisions on our TA. And because the language is very explicit then the arbitaror would side with the union in very short time.

As a matter of fact if they can't staff their airplanes due to lack of crews and the flow isn't attracting new hires then the only place you can correct is pay and benefits. The company thinks the flow will work, we don't think it would be such a good tool for hiring but either way we will have the leverage we need to snapback and improve anything we are losing with the TA.

5c per diem and 5% on insurance contributions in three years.


Most FOs are grandfathered and most captains will continue to go to the top of the scale and by then the will flow. Having the increase to 100% of the first 30 in an AA class was a major improvement.

 

Flow through sounds like a great idea, but what most fail to realize is there isn't anyone to attract. The best you can hope for is to maybe attract existing airline pilots from a few of the weaker carriers, likely 1 or 2 will fail this year. After that, there is nobody left to attract. There are no pilots in the training pipeline, nobody to attract, nobody to care.

 

Arbitration can take awhile. Every time I talk to Eagle pilots they are complaining about a reserve section of the contract currently being violated. They say it's very clear language but it's still being violated and the arbitration has been going on for over a year.

Also the last thing your management will do is give pay and benefit improvements to all pilots at Eagle. They will give bigger and bigger bonuses to new hires in order to fill classes.

 

Apparently the language concerning reserve turn backs was not as cut and dry as we thought it was. The courts don't just side with the company because they hate pilots, we'll have to wait for the ruling but there was an obviously an argument the company could have made there.

 

Can you post the language? What is unclear about it? Why would this TA be any different? Even if the contract is as black and white as some of the Eagle yes voters think, the grievance process can still take quite some time.

The courts might not hate pilots, but they love corporations and the system and process is stacked against labor.

 

I think the language is very clear personally, I also realize I'm not an expert. The courts will rule the correct way and won't be influenced by lobbies, etc. It's one of the few institutions in this country I still believe in.

There will be loopholes in every contract, our MEC along with ALPA need to minimize those loopholes and I feel they've done a good job of that in this proposal.