QUESTION from an F9 guy. Does your training cadre (sim and line check airman) have their union LEC and is there language in your CBA addressing that? My old ALPA regional had such an LEC. I don’t have your current CBA handy anymore.

Edit: just found your FEB2018 Tentative Agreement. Reading Section 9 now. Looks like it’s all spelled out and is bargained by the union. That’s great we literally have a couple guys in standards and training that can’t get anywhere with the VP of Flt Ops to adjust our rates, which are close yours but we both trail the industry average. Our lack of language for training cadre is leftover from our FAPA (in-house union) days where we drew a line between our training and union guys, so the union never negotiated language in the contract for training staff.

Seems like it got lost in the merger craziness, but more alignment between F9 and NK. NK joins the 1500 hour club with their “Spirt Direct” program with ATP, while F9 has been doing this with Purdue for a while. Legacies might be sucking up all the ULCC pilots but the ULCCs aren’t going to leave anything for the regionals. Looks like the race for flight school partnerships is on, I give regionals 12-18months left.

F9 has had something with ATP since before covid. Just Spirit continuing to align forces with its new master :-).

Both sides have to agree to arbitration, ALPA would never agree to arbitration. It’s always turned town

Virgin and Alaska did go to arbitration for their JCBA. I don’t remember why bc yes arbitration has to be agreed to in normal section 6 negotiations

Your training pilots are not represented within ALPA even at their base LEC? Are they considered management? Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying.

You better not go over to the AA forum and try to spread that logic 😳😳

They've both paid off a ton of debt and cleaned up the balance sheets. Both companies are healthy. It makes sense to do that when investors are expecting a loss alresdy and you get a tax break.

Raise ticket prices or other revenue an unrecognizable amount. This isn’t a regional with a fixed income. They can grow revenue if they’re good at their job. Also, with crazy inflation the contract will have to be even bigger to realize the same buying power it would have had a year ago. Everyone in the country is paying more for everything. A few bucks on an airline ticket even for our price conscious passengers won’t be questioned. They will pay it.

They paid the C suite literally tens of millions of dollars just for the work to make the deal happen and get it closed. Sorry if I don’t care where they get the money for us from. That’s their job. Our job is to go in and get what’s ours and to make it as big as possible. It’s not our job to rationalize if it’s possible. That their job.

Regionals seem to be like a collapsing soap bubble. They are losing so many CAs that they won’t be able to fly enough to give the FOs enough experience to become CAs. Just look at the bonuses some regionals are offering for DECs and near 1000 121 hour near-DECs. There are going to be a lot of quasi-experienced regional FOs starting over at the bottom of the seniority list at another airline soon when their regional folds. If it were me I’d damn sure rather it was NK or F9 rather than another regional where I’d be worrying about repeating the process when their CAs all got hired away too.