Per internal email from a Managing Director (which I will not post in full due to policy and sensitivity) stated that “we have recently experienced increased Flight Instructor attrition and qualification delays, leading to us not having enough Training personnel to instruct all classes. As a result, we have canceled the XXXXX Captain Upgrade class, reducing our total June vacancy to XX Captain positions…Although First Officer attrition did not cause this change, we are keeping a close eye on Pilot departures and may adjust future Crew staffing plans if needed to maintain seat balance.

If only one could have seen that coming…! Ratios already are becoming imbalanced, and it appears we think that is going to continue or get worse as pilots leave, and we cannot fill classes. SWA: it’s time. Enough monkeying around and fix this. Leading contract NOW.

Poopoo out.

 

SWA FU C.K.ed around and are now finding out!

 

Like others have said, we are better than Mesa. I actually think we’re probably better than boutique airlines and Southern airways. Although I would bet it is close .


This place is a 3 tier airline job .


Let’s not forget they threatened a furlough over 10% of the pilot group, knowing they did not need to.

 

This happened at my last place. It’s a vicious cycle really. SWA already has an issue with long upgrade times. FO’s see this and in todays world have options, so they leave. Then upgrades slow even more to achieve a balance in the seats, and on and on it goes.

 

OTOF, a SWAPA member estimated that each pilot who leaves costs the company ~$50K to retrain a new pilot to replace them. So, given that 158 pilots have left since Dec 2021, that means pilot attrition has cost the company ~$8M in training costs. Of course, that is offset to some degree by slightly lowering the average longevity pay rate of the pilot group.

Regardless, if we were to go on strike, based on 2019 numbers (the last full year unaffected by the pandemic), the daily revenue lost by the corporation would be ~$65M. In other words, in ONE day a strike would cost the company more than 8X what more than a year of pilot attrition has cost the company.

$65M is equal to the cost it would take to train 1,300 pilots. So, another way to look at the difference in leverage produced by pilot attrition versus a strike is that EACH DAY of a strike would create the same financial pressure on the company as 1,300 pilots leaving.

Since it has taken 506 days to lose 158 pilots, that’s an average of .312 pilots per day lost. If we divide 1,300 (the number of pilots per day in terms of training cost it would take to equal the cost of one day of a strike), by .312, we discover that we can view a strike as producing 4,166X as much leverage as our current rate of attrition.

That doesn’t include leverage generated as a result of the lost revenue due to the “book away” phenomenon in the 30-90 days leading up to a strike. It also doesn’t include the intangible losses to the corporation in terms of brand injury that are attached to a strike, esp in the wake of our Christmas meltdown and zany, love, family public image that we try to promote.

IOW, the credible threat of a legal strike generates thousands of times more leverage than pilot attrition at the rate we are currently experiencing it.

 

But you're not including the lost revenue from the parked planes because we cant staff them.
also in the 50 yrs leading up to this attrition the company had only ~500 people leave for other airlines. That's 10/yr. We now average more than 1 a day.
I'd say its significant.

 

I actually agree with the company on this... they own both recruitment and retention. So let them eat their own incompetence and stalling of the contracts. SWAPA should definitely stick with data-driven approach and keep showing up with data to back up the narrative. However, in negotiations, that's not the topic we should even be discussing.

 

I’m not saying it’s not “significant.” I’m not saying we shouldn’t leverage it.

But I am saying the credible threat of a strike is much, much more significant in terms of leverage than even more than one pilot per day leaving.

The cost to train one pilot is ~$50K. So, let’s say the rate of attrition is now up to 1.33 pilots per day. Even at that rate, a strike, just in the simple terms of straight lost revenue, costs the company 977X more than pilots leaving right now. If the rate of attrition increases to two pilots per day, a strike costs the company 650X what pilots leaving would cost it.

How many flights per day are being cancelled per day as a result of pilot attrition versus how many flights per day would be cancelled per day as the result of a strike? I don’t know the numbers on lost revenue per day as a result of attrition, but I think it’s safe to assume it would take A LOT of flights cancelled per day to begin to approach the financial impact of a strike - probably many, many more flights per day than may be being cancelled now as the result of attrition.

Just saying, it seems like our primary focus as a pilot group is fixed upon a source of leverage that is hundreds to thousands of times less powerful than the credible threat of a strike. It seems to me like we’ve got it backwards.

 

what about having to park 50-70 planes a day because we are short staffed. I dont know the numbers but I wonder what that cost is?

 

This exactly. It's a data point, not a negotiating tactic.

a 4 day partial shutdown in December and January cost this airline close to a billion dollars. That's the ultimate leverage. The threat of us setting the parking brake and walking away is what will drive them to come to the table with significant improvements. Not hiring and training a few pilots. That's chump change.