The 1st round of this furlough will be much larger than the first round of the previous two furloughs. But for those that haven't been through it before, the dust doesn't settle after the initial round. It's just the start. Question is will they announce their aim number from the start or just announce the first round and leave those that are left just hanging on their creeping body dump.

there is really no incentive to announce anything until they have to.

Nope. There isn't. They weren't going to announce until the last minute in 08 until the MC said he would if they didn't come clean. June 23, 2008 is when they announced 1450 if I remember correctly.

We had a somewhat normal schedule operating back then. Now they can slice and dice all they want up front and not risk understaffing.

No disagreement there. They can go deep without blinking. By deep I mean a couple thousand in the first round.

The current environment is unprecedented. We are flying 20% of our schedule and the company had a 6 month heads up to start the bids/retraining. They could easily furlough 3000+ in October and not blink an eye. I still don’t understand why people compare this to past furloughs. 9/11 was a sudden unexpected event that they had to react to immediately, while still flying a 50-60%+ schedule. Apples to oranges compared to now. The CARES act provided them a heads up to do this as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Numbers are wrong. 30% july, 40% for August. None of this accounts for the 600 cargo flights a month that are going on.

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I wouldn't hang your hat on the cargo flights and a small fraction of what the schedule used to look like. Remember, those are in lieu of the pax flights. The cargo flights will stop once pax flights resume in a more normal schedule. The cargo will go with the pax then. But....I don't think that will happen any time soon as this has turned into a political football. Europe not letting in US passengers, Chinese playing games with required testing, and restrictions only for non-Chinese airlines.

I'd "hang my hat on that" to some extent. It's not growth, but seems (hopefully) to be a surprise pocket of stability that bridges a gap in the absence of int'l pax flying to/from the US - which is its own trainwreck of an issue. If nothing else it's definitely helpful for our 787 pilot numbers and therefore overall numbers.

Amongst the many things that will probably begin to be "revealed" in a couple of days, I think that the initial baseline 30% plan may not have accounted for the relative success of cargo-only and other carriers pushing us to up our domestic game (relatively speaking), though on the flip side it also probably didn't account for FL, TX, AZ surges that are "the biggest and best" #somuchwinning

totally understandable to be on the skeptical side. However, I think one of the main differences is the uncertainty around the recovery. Some metrics are already back up to 100%, while others are lagging terribly. It is very hard to say what the economy will look like a year from now. I personally think this is what’s driving uncertainty for the company’s staffing projections.

2001 not only saw the terrorist attacks, but a fairly large bursting of the tech bubble, which put us in a recession. 2008 saw one of the biggest drops of the stock market in a century. I am not bullish per se, but while not likely, I don’t think a quick recovery is totally out of the question.