Quote:
Originally Posted by acl65pilot
Of course, the the letter has a certain context to it. Yes, they did not go to the point of saying, "RJ's need to be flying by us," but the fact is the Slot swap had nothing to do with recapturing RJ flying. Mainline growth, yes, but not by scope recapture. Again, the kept the letter in the context of the slot swap, and what "assurance" were made.
As with everything, if the pilot go gravitate to the next shiny ball, and do not continually state their discontent with what the company did here, then nothing will ever by gained.
It just sounded a bit to apologetic WRT the company's actions in LGA. They were disappointed that we didn't get very much mainline but still seemed like they were falling for the old playbook of "we need these outsourced planes to grow the market so you can get it later" nonsense. 250+ DC-9-10 replacement jets in addition to how many more hundreds of smaller RJ's were all supposed to build markets and so was Alaska I'm sure. Yet mainline only shrinks. We get a route here and there, but we shrink as thousands and thousands of pilot jobs doing Delta flying go to other seniority lists.
LGA is even more insulting because of our help with the "lobbying" in addition to the fact that by its nature, a domestic "hub" in LGA is almost entirely O&D. There will be very few instances of pax connecting there because of the slot growth to even maybe fly on mainline metal even if that justified the initial outsourcing (which it doesn't). This is pure mainline bypass. I'm sure it will also suck capacity out of JFK and EWR to some extent as well, possibly causing some down-gauging there eventually, and in some cases causing mainline to drop to outsourced RJ.
This is starting to go beyond cockeyed optimism and constructive engagement and sneaking into the realm of Baghdad Bob. The fact that mass outsourcing is supposed to bring us 200 million a year in revenues that will supposedly help our next contract is one of the biggest double-u tee eff's in critical thinking I've seen in a long time. I mean srsly, are we really going down that road again after the last decade and a half? If that's true, then outsourcing is good for us and ergo more outsourcing would be even better?
At least they mentioned scope though. That's a start I guess. But that letter is proof positive that we still have a lot of work to do not only in negotiating with the company but in fortifying our own foundation in the first place before we do.