Furloughs?
 

New alpa email does not sound optimistic.

Agreed time to get the resumes ready! Oh wait there won’t be any flying jobs.




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I call the Home Depot garden department! Apps in! I hope they have employee discounts!

**** if it’s like 2007/8 those jobs won’t even be available!


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Most of our bookings aren’t made until 1-2 weeks out. We will know more later in the month. It sounds like some people are canceling, but wtf knows what will happen. For every person that does there could be someone taking their place buying a ticket.

Were you reading the same email as everyone else? Seems like you didn’t pick up on the tone

As long as I keep seeing consistent 130+ numbers I’m not concerned.

130 is great but the missing piece is ticket price. That is not an opinion piece either, strait from Ted

If you’re not concerned it’s not because you’re seeing 130+ (of a smaller airline btw), it’s because your seniority number is <2000.

Whether you’re concerned or not has no influence on the outcome on October 1st.
VIL’s going to anyone who bid it for August should be your clue as to what is on the horizon.
At 55,000 plus new cases a day this thing is far from over.
July schedules were built with an eye towards optimism when the curve was flattening. Conditions since the building of those schedules have changed.
500 furloughs are not out of the realm of possibility.
Todays email sounded like a warning. Be prepared.

Smaller airline and furloughs likely IMHO. Although the tone of the email didn’t really shock me or make me nervous . I feel I knew it was coming I guess. With spike in cases and the usual slow months of September/October on the horizon I assumed July was just going to be one off. The analysts and CEOs keep saying 2-3 year timeframe for a recovery in their guestimation. There will be some pain for a while. And the glory days are over for a while . But I still wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. we will make it to the other side of this.

What's interesting is if you go on Spirit's site. The schedule / avalible flights paints a different picture for August. It seems there's more available flights than July. If they are planing on having the same schedule in August as the same at the end of June. They'll probably need to cancel 250-300 flights a day for August.

Just curious how you came up with that number?? (It’s the same number I came up with...)

Just a calculated guess. It’s a round number that approximates 20% of our staffing.

most people have no clue - until they end up on reserve and realize how bad it is - you are correct on the tone and forecast

People still think we aren’t going to furlough any? Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I don’t see not furloughing as a possibility. Hey, maybe (and hopefully because I’m at the bottom) I’m wrong.

If 2500 is correct then Delta is planning a 17 percent pilot reduction. Id like to think we're a lower number than that.

No concessions. If they are gonna furlough anyway, shareholders don't need any other gifts.

I read the email. People have been psycho analyzing the tone of every MEC email since this has begun. I remember in May an email came out and talked about a “glimmer of hope” that demand was coming back. Then it ended with the timeline of when furlough notices would go out and everyone lost it.

We all need to be provided with far more information than a super vague “July isn’t looking as good as we hoped”. Well what exactly has happened? Right now everything is up for assumption and quite frankly, until I see actual numbers, I’m not going to waste that much energy on what may or may not happen, especially given how things change every week or less.

A couple days ago it was rumored we were canceling tons of July flights. Someone in the base chat compiled the entire month on CrewTrac and very little was canceled or changed. Mainly just Intl markets.

Someone above posted they went online and claim we are selling tickets on even more (or equal) the number of flights for August. But then you’ll hear how we are dropping to 220 flights a day in August? Well which is it?

If a majority of our tickets are being sold 1-2 weeks out, it is still too early to know what really is going to happen in July.

7-10 days ago I read the P2P transcript. There was a little nugget in there that said that, at this moment in time, Spirit was not planning on option 3 happening (right sizing). Of course things can change, but still.

I know cases are picking up. I’m well aware. It’s hard to know what’s real anymore. I’ve read that some states are counting positive antibodies tests as positive cases now.

Sure some probably are canceling, but I’ll stand behind that for everyone that does there are others will take their place. The media doesn’t help in this, but they have become major hypocrites the last couple weeks.

We will know for sure by the end of the month and into August what really happens.

Anyone who thinks we won't furlough at this point is delusional.

this post isn’t gonna age well bro - we can revisit in a few days when the bids are out

No concessions
 

None of us have a crystal ball and the only thing in our control is to continue to operate the flight as safely and efficiently as possible. However when the company denied profit sharing they closed the door on concessions. If we don’t share the wealth then we don’t share the famine.

I’m in the bottom 10% and the house I’m building is going to be sold to someone else if I get furloughed, but I’d rather that happen over y’all taking concessions.

That said, we junior guys reeeeeaaaally appreciate everyone participating in the voluntary mitigation stuff. Could save us some real hardship :D

Hmmm... Let’s see what that would actually save:

Furlough 500 pilots From 1 October until summer 2021

250 on first year pay times min guarantee is 9x72x$58x250= ~$ 9 million
250 on second year pay 9x72x$109x250= $17.7

Displace 250 most-likely 4th year captains 9x72x($208-123)x250= $13.7 million.

so basically $40 million less whatever the training churn would be for the downgrades.


At a $4 million cash burn rate a day that is only ten days. When you consider costs, I’m not too sure that modest a furlough would even be worth doing. My guess is that it will either be considerably more than 500 or Spirit won’t furlough at all.

Granted, I ain’t got $40 million PERSONALLY, but it still seems like a lot of trouble for not all that much gain.

I'm curious to see how that compares to an alternative such as longer VIL (3,6,12 months). Since those tend to go more senior. Plus with VIL, the company can make adjustments month by month.

Pilots and labor are just one piece of a large pie. Too many keep assuming this industry is just gonna snap back. What if it doesnt? Then we're bailing on gates, selling planes (as 'colored' by Ted in the Q1 conference call) and 'right-sizing' in a meaningful, survival-driven way. Hoping for the best.

For our health?

Doctor to Doctor, For our collective health.

Assuming furlough is indeed imminent, is this almost certainly going to fall under “Act of God” (making furlough benefits null) or does the CARES funding pushing timelines out mean that the company would likely be obligated to provide that coverage?

management sure is good at providing “color” and “pushing the levers” They mentioned 30 planes they can return to lessors in the q1 call no penalty - watch for that next.

There are gonna be lots of barely flown and recently built NEOs freed up by the bankruptcies of European carriers. It wouldn’t surprise me if they could be picked up fairly cheaply. For that matter, interest rates are REALLY low. Ditching older CEOs on lease to get newer and more efficient NEOs might be a good thing. Even if you had to borrow money from the government and give them an equity interest in Spirit to do it. Your management damn sure ought to be shopping for discount parts in that market.

my understanding / belief was the LCC model was "more immune" to this than the Legacy model.

I wonder what is going on at Frontier, Sun Country, Jet Blue, Allegiant, etc (in regards to possible furloughs)

good luck guys

No one is immune, but the LCC’s are still in better shape overall. Mostly due to how slow business travel will take to recover, plus International business.

Our international capacity was roughly 15%, which Id bet is higher than Allegiant, and Frontier. I have no idea about JetBlue...
If we have a greater exposure to that market than other LCCs/ULCCs, we will need to downsize more.

and they are, to an economic downturn, but that’s not what this is. The destruction of our economy is a side effect of a global pandemic. This isn’t 2008, and the situation isn’t the same.

I agree. This outcome is very likely.

1. Whichever airline starts growing again before others (worldwide context) will find pretty sweet deals on brand new or barely used airframes
2. Oil prices will climb pretty fast as restarting production has a lag and several oil companies will go under. This will make NEOs even more attractive.

Bottom line is, as we downsize don’t completely freak out if you see the company returning airplanes to lessors. We’ll be able to pick up new airplanes quickly when demand picks up again.

I mean more in the transatlantic and pacific markets when I say international, sorry for not being clear. A lot of the Caribbean stuff is starting to open up. PUJ for instance opened up two days ago. A lot of those market rely heavily on tourism, whereas the EU travel ban has no end in sight yet.

Exactly, in a conventional recession the business travelers and spendy pax might have to tighten their belts and fly an LCC. Although the economy has undoubtedly taken a hit, it's largely waiters and waitresses who took the brunt of it. Wealthier travelers still have the money to fly the legacies, or they'll just skip it altogether and do a Zoom meeting. Problematically, it's largely that confidence in air travel has dropped among every socioeconomic demographic.

It was mentioned that the tourist-centric destinations we often serve will tend to open up faster than the more businessy international destinations served by the legacies. Further, supposing San Pedro Sula or wherever takes a while to open up, who's to say we can't repurpose that aircraft to bolster current domestic destinations or add low hanging domestic fruit we've been eyeing for a while? I feel like Spirit would do well in SAT, ELP, and ABQ.

With regards to B6 they approved a LOA that prevents furloughs until at least May 2021. And Sunny has been doing a fair amount of Cargo flying.

so can we do something like this, too?

No idea what JB did, but if it involves concessions, it’s a no go. Anytime a pilot group does that, it lowers the bar, takes years to get back if at all, doesn’t prevent what mgt is going to eventually do anyway. Besides that, mgt was never interested in profit sharing, low balled us on pay rates and 401k contributions, why should we as one of the lowest paid A320 operators be willing to bend? To save a few first year guys from a short furlough? Sorry, I know that sounds insensitive, but this is the way the industry works and if you have been around long enough, it comes with the territory. I’ve been there and many others have also. I certainly didn’t want anyone taking concessions to save my job.