It’s SWApAs way. Get ready to vote no on the turd that’s heading our way(sometime 2024). We won’t even see blended rates. Our retro won’t be full and we are already AIP lagging items and reps are saying it’s just great. 16% will vote no and the rest will ask a year later who agreed to this crap.

 

Running the numbers on a new SWA contract versus a later-than-earliest-upgrade career track at Delta, we need in the neighborhood of a 40% DOS raise followed by three 5% annual raises just to match Delta over 30 years. We need more than that to match them over shorter time periods.

When you consider that we fly 83% more departures, 63% more passengers, and 24% more block hours than Delta, to achieve a premium on them for the additional risk and liability we assume requires an even larger contractual pay rate increase than 40/5/5/5.

For your polling purposes, 40/5/5/5 gets us to right below $400/TFP. Achieving a 25% premium on Delta over 30 years to reflect our additional risk and liability requires more than a 70% DOS raise, followed by 5/5/5. That puts our final 12-yr CA rate at $486/TFP.

 

It’s different this time. Really. We’ll get 25% voting no. Not 16%. But 75% will still say, “If it’s good enough for Casey and SWAPA, it’s good enough for me.”

 

I can agree with that. The result will be the same. 100% will say I didn’t vote for this garbage. What happened?

 

I listen to a lot of what you say and agree with it, but this just isn't helpful. It's up to all of us to educate the masses on what we do finally achieve and if it is worthy of a yes or no vote on its own merits, not on "I vote no on everything" or "the first TA is an automatic no".
We are in a transition from a very old, uneducated, and unplugged pilot group to a young, educated, and connected group. These SkyWest kids, who came from a carrier with no union, are bigger union advocates than most of the old guys I fly with. Instead of doing the "cool guy 16 percent club" or the eeyore schtick of "I guess we will vote in the crappy TA", let's work on maybe winning the war of hearts and minds.
No TA is perfect. There are just too many competing forces involved. This one needs to be pretty amazing and I think everyone realizes that.

 

Ummm, I think it'd be difficult to argue that many people have done more to educate the pilot group both in ways you've seen here on APC and in ways you probably have no idea about. It's not a "cool guy 16 percent club" to me. I tried like hell last time to make the 16% into at least 51%. But people here were then, and judging by most of the people I fly with nowadays, still largely checked out.

We here on the various forums are a tiny minority of relatively engaged people. Last cycle, we had "SWAPA 2.0" and the pilot group's massive participation at the pickets. Everything was supposed to be different. And then we voted in TA-2 with high-fives all around. Some guys were hugging each other because they thought SWAPA had broken new ground by getting a B-Fund, which crappy old bottom-feeder AirTran had already had for at least a decade before our pilot group was crying tears of joy over getting one. TA-2 is the very piece of garbage people are complaining about right now as enabling the company to bend us over, day after day.

Now we have current SWAPA and our current pilot group. Everything is supposed to be different all over again. We'll see.

But we've already started off poorly by inexplicably delaying the filing for mediation beyond anything the pandemic could account for. There was very little awareness among the pilot group as to why filing for mediation earlier is important and very little pressure from the pilot group on SWAPA to expedite the filing for mediation. As a consequence, we are at least a year out right now from the point in time at which the NMB even begins to feel pressure based on time in mediation to release us.

Somebody said SWAPA "top-roped" the company with the 99% SAV. No. While good and better than I expected, the SAV at this point in negotiations and mediation does not create a lot of pressure on the company. The SAV becomes more and more important as we approach the point in time at which a release becomes realistic (ie, not now). What will be "top-roping" the company is waiting likely at least another year to get to a release without capitulating for less than we can achieve before then due to negotiating fatigue, "can't get everything in one go," and time value of money arguments.

You guys can say this kind of talk is unproductive. But the emphasis around here among the truly "cool kids" is to close our eyes and say things like "SWAPA speaks for me" right up until about 18 months after a ratified contract when people realize SWAPA convinced them to vote for another lagging turd. That hasn't proven to be very productive either around here. By then, it's way too late to point out how this pilot group has always seemed to need someone, whether that's Herb or JW or CM, to tell them how to think and that those people have not always been right.

 

Thanks for all you do, but you aren't going to realistically change more than maybe a half of a percent of the votes around this place. Most of the people who get on any type of forum are not the ones you need to reach. Telling the masses how stupid they are for voting a certain way will only backfire spectacularly.
I am confident that we are going to achieve a great contract. Yeah, I probably won't like 100 percent of it, but that's ok too. So, I guess "SWAPA speaks for me" or whatever us mindless sheep like to say. I am proud of where we are and am in it to win it. Like you, I believe the only way to get what we deserve is to take this thing to its logical conclusion.

 

Like I said, posting on APC is only one way I have been active in attempting to educate and make a difference in the pilot group. I’d also say that very few people, including very few within SWAPA, were talking about many of the RLA-associated topics that we hear much more about these days before I began hammering them both here on APC and elsewhere - for years now. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

So, I’m pretty certain I’ve made a difference that has had a significant impact on the RLA topic within our pilot group. When it comes to negotiating a contract, the DNA of a pilot group’s life, there are few topics more important than the RLA.

To your point about being confident “we are going to achieve a great contract,” most of the pilot group was confident that we were going to get a great contract last time too after “SWAPA 2.0” stepped in. Most everyone here believed our current contract was a great contract, though most people didn’t like 100% of it, when they voted to ratify it.

One important reason much of the pilot group believed it was a great contract was because our then-SWAPA president led them to believe it was. So enamored was so much of the pilot group by his public charisma, word of his aw-shucks-all-but-endorsement of it was all it took to push many within the pilot group over the edge into a yes vote.

It wasn’t until our pilot group had to live under our “great contract” for a while that buyer’s remorse began to grip more and more of us. Now you’ll find very few people who find the prospect palatable of continuing to live indefinitely under the chaos that is allowed under our current “great” contract - the one our last SWAPA president enthusiastically let it be known he voted yes for. And with him, a large bloc of the pilot group followed suit.

So, you can blow off the skepticism of people like myself who have not just complained about the situation but actually done something about it. It’s so trite to say, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it,” but I’m trying to point out that just because SWAPA is better than it was before and it seems like we have a lot of leverage, it doesn’t mean that we’re not going to drop the ball like we’ve done repeatedly in the past.

People, not just pilots, have a tendency to think “this time is different.” They buy into the next bubble because “this time is different.” They follow a new guru because the new guru “is different.” Someone smart said, “There is nothing new except that which is forgotten.”

If we’re not aware of and very consciously attempting to avoid the strong historical proclivity of this pilot group to be led by SWAPA into voting yes on substandard and sorely lacking deals, we are more than likely going to repeat that history again.

You can take all of that as someone calling you a “mindless sheep,” or “telling the masses how stupid they are,” but the better lesson, IMO, is to resolve to not make the same old mistake one more time.

And, BTW, point of order, for argument’s sake, if I am, in fact “telling the masses how stupid they are” here on APC, and if me posting on APC only has the potential to change “half a percent of the votes around this place,” how will that backfire “spectacularly”? I think you mean something more like it might “kinda backfire,” or “backfire benignly” or something more akin to what might happen if a whole half a percent of people vote against whatever it is I’m advocating because they feel, as you do, like I’m calling them “mindless sheep.”

 

History is history. Hopefully we learned something from it.
You seem pretty confident about your point of view, so I doubt I am going to change your mind. Best of luck.

 

Hopefully the polling accurately captures the new landscape.

OALs have far better life insurance, disability, profit sharing, pay, parental leave, etc. Hell, they even get more vacation than we do.

We need big improvements in ALL sections.