If they do have to wait until June for the merger agreement to play out, surely these numbers seem a little premature? I don’t believe we've seen attrition really play out fully, obviously takes a decent chunk of time for people to interview and receive a class date that’s likely a few months down the line?

 

they are premature because they are part of a calculated rumor. Someone somewhere said “if they furlough, x number of planes times x number of pilots = total pilots that would be about 25 percent of the FO list and then we would have to downgrade 10 percent captains to match. I heard a long time ago that any storey that begins with “I heard” or that’s from “a reputable source” is probably 90 percent horse s^%t. At least, that’s what I heard from a reputable source.

 

or it’s from management saying X planes with current crew staffing and history says X number of crews. Now figure X amount of pilots we have and X amount of money needing to be saved (on record by management in a town hall), it’s not hard to figure out. I would say the 25% is accurate, before natural attrition. Now if most airlines have stopped and slowed….25% might be closer to accurate than we like/anticipated.

 

I happen to like longbeach overnight = I don't get out much.........got it.......

 

Long Beach is nothing to get excited about. It would be like taking Detroit and plopping it right on the beach, a heavily industrial urban core with lots of weird and rough people out and about. Can't walk barefoot in the sand because of the drug needles, homeless tent camps on the beach, dirty water with trash everywhere...no thanks.

I'll take it over BWI or EWR, but there are far better places to be in socal.

 

Just like everything else, to each their own. But lets be honest, I don't think we have an overnight that would exert excitement towards! SJU maybe? As far as BWI......not even close!! I'd have no problem walking around at night in Long Beach.......cant say the same for BWI!!

 

if that’s the angle of the rumor you would like to believe, than it’s totally you’re prerogative to believe it.

 

The thing is, it is hard to figure out...
Yes, we have a clearly defined number of crews per plane. And you can calculate some of the cost of that by adding all the pilot slaries together. But there is a lot of other cost, like support staff, training staff, office building, Simulator time, that does not decrease if you furlough crews. And we would not furlough crews, we would furlough junior FOs, so very little cost savings. One of the biggest reasons there weren't more furloughs during the pandemic (outside of gov cheeze) was that the cost to retrain everyone was higher than to offer over 50% pay for people to sit home.

Napkin math:
Furlough 25%, so 1000 on 1st&2nd year pay, downgrade 500 on 5th year pay would save about $180M/yr or $45M/Q. And it would mean 30 aircraft not staffed, but they have no engines anyway...
Sounds great. But NK net loss last Q was over $180M, so you would have to furlough the other 75% of the pilots as well to save enough........ (yes, I know, furloughing the senior would save more)

(What I do find interesting is that the whole strategy of NK was always been based on continued growth. And anytime the growth would slow down the analytst would be worried, and pushed for growth. And now all the analytsts are saying that the ULCC market is only so big, and we can't be profitable at our size. And they have known about basic economy from the legacies forever, and/or should have known the effects of that.)

 

Model must change in a big way. Period

 

I think Teddy kind of alluded to that in his video message today.

My concern is you have to spend money to make money. But can we do that with not having made a profit since the pandemic, massive debt coming due, and parked airplanes.