As the 2016 Republic bankruptcy shows:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/trave...able/81035522/

the whole bankruptcy process is just one more management mechanism to manage the company. They don’t even have to be losing money to do it.

But I do think the Big Three got caught with the wrong business model for this recovery and AA in particular was overextended with debt. AA declaring bankruptcy is almost a given now and that forcing Delta and UA to follow suit to avoid AA having an advantage over them after the recovery is a very real possibility.

EIL/Unpaid Leave Extension????
 

Bankruptcy puts pressure on other airlines because the ones that do go through the process get to write off a lot of bad debt or at least pay pennies on the dollar for it. Therefore we are at an unfair advantage as we are still paying full price plus whatever interest for our large amounts of debt when everyone in bankruptcy isn’t, plus the bankruptcy courts will destroy union contracts while others can’t. You can renegotiate airplane orders and loans... List is to long to write everything out but it certainly has the potential to snowball and certainly puts pressure on other management teams to try and even the playing field..

Listen I won’t ever entertain a single concession ever. Played that game before. I’m just noting that some seem to think what affects the bigger carriers doesn’t affect us. I’d bet money that if the United deal come out before we did ours did to mirror close to Southwest we wouldn’t have the deal we have. Also, given that it has no guarantees for furloughs past October I think management may see that door as still open for leverage.

Then furlough...500+ pilots got a stay of execution when 1000 pilots took a partial pay leave. If you think this group will/should/are going to entertain management coming back to the table again and asking for more or threatening furloughs again, then furlough. Let the company risk not being properly staffed when travel resumes and they have guys furloughed and guys on EIL with no trigger in the MOU to make guys come back early.

Im willing to bed the 500+ guys who were going to be furloughed, and were saved by the EILs, would not want the contract gutted after the company threaten to furlough them again. Furloughs happen in this industry, we try to prevent them, and we did. If it requires concessions, sorry, but the MEC has spoken on this already.

Meanwhile.... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/06/trum...-election.html

agreed and hope you’re right. A few posts had seemed like they were whistling along and spirit is going to come right out of this. I must have read the room wrong. Back to my hole

(Personal opinion)
the EIL’s saved me from being furloughed. I’d rather be furloughed for a year or two than come back to a weaker contract that hurts me and my senior peers. I think most of us new guys feel this way. I consider myself incredibly lucky just to be on this seniority list

Think everyone at the bottom feels this way.

40ish from the bottom and I agree.

You have my word, I will not vote for any sort of concessions. If my paycheck is less cause hours are reduced, that is a concession.

same. I said as much during the heat of it all as well. Same goes for the Facebook page.

That said, regardless if they meant it to do so or not, honoring the CJOs into May (?) sends a strong signal that Spirit views this crisis as an opportunity, as it should.

I don't understand the legacy pilot groups not aggressively targeting scope when their management came calling for concessions.

For those groups, some sort of concession might have been or might be inevitable. However, whatever language the company wanted better have come with a 50/70/90 seat pay rates, even regional +5% ones.

However, the mainline MECs just won't fight scope.

Why fight scope when their company uses those regional airlines and their slave wages to put a 5-figure profit sharing check in your bank account every April?

/s

I was hoping for this at DL. Give the company some relief on min hours and maybe displacement training language in exchange for tighter scope. However our management has claimed FM and is violating our existing scope clause as we speak, making me believe management would not entertain scope tightening.

Also we have a large contingent of our airline who only cares about $$$ and many more who think that if we made a deal like that, management would take the cuts, go to BK and gut our newly tightened scope clause.

That's not an unreasonable worry/position, but the reality is that if there are contractors doing your job cheaper, that represents a threat regardless of a potential BK or not. But, as job losses loom, scope should be prioritized IMO.

For the DL guys, its got to be frustrating for management to show up with their hands out, violating contracts while millions of dollars that went to JVs is being flushed.

Yeah, that's why/how the Delta MEC was sold on RJs in the early 1990s. It was short-sighted then...mostly a case of zipper suited sun gods too good to fly a RJ.

It cost thousands of pilots millions of dollars.

Thus, why its hard to feel too much sympathy for the legacy pilot groups writ large, as unfair as it is to the junior guys who will be the obvious billpayers. The Delta, Northwest, American and United guys that allowed scope to kill the career expectations of two or three generations of pilots are all drooling in their oatmeal right now.

That doesn't fix the problem that potentially thousands of legacy pilot will be either working under C scale or out of a job entirely, as a bunch of regional guys fly DL, AMR or UA pax around.

Not sure how this topic got brought up as a response to an unrelated post weeks ago.

That said, while I’m not a fan of the overall deal the United deal did tighten scope