This is starting to turn into a cash/debt doom loop. As they try and sell assets to generate cash, they become smaller and make less revenue to pay debts, engine repairs, etc and then have to sell more assets to generate cash and so forth. I'm guessing Q2 financial are not looking very good as well as the forward looking cash flows as the timing of this announcement is at a time of peak airline revenues. It doesn't get better than Q2 with Q3 closely behind.

Good luck to everyone and get those apps out. American and United probably have the most growth over the next 4-5 years with massive retirements and lots of planes being delivered. If you can get to UA, DL or AA take the job while you can.

 

Yep, 26 sales would be 350+ furloughs on top of the 270.

 

Lincoln would say no, but the answer is yes. If the company is bought, the plan is to keep shrinking. The 100 airplane/1700 pilotnfigure thrown out earlier is also what I heard.

 

As one of those likely to be furloughed in November, any idea what having recall rights would mean in a potential merger/buyout scenario, considering our CBA does not have a "pilots must go with planes" stratification clause?

 

they retrofitted 115 planes with the new seating configuration. most likely 115 going forward and about 2k pilots

 

I'm not sure but it would be a good question for the union.

 

ALPA merger policy would protect furloughed pilots if there was a merger with pilots on furlough. Its not saying those pilots would come back quickly, especially if it was Frontier or an LCC because those airlines aren't really growing and it would take a long time for jobs to appear. The biggest problem is that while a smaller Spirit is a better "bite sized" acquisition, it still has all the debt associated with it. Effectively making it a poison pill acquisition.

WRT the "pilots must go with planes stratification clause" your CBA can't force another airline to take pilots just because they bought your planes. Other airlines are not a party to your CBA. Those clauses are generally only feel good clauses, and usually say the Company must make a good faith effort to negotiate jobs at the acquiring airline. But they aren't going cancel a plane sale because the other airline doesn't want to integrate a bunch of pilots that it didn't get a chance to interview and make a hiring decision on. The acquiring pilot group would be largely against this as well since its possible the acquired pilot group could try and claim an SLI under Fragmentation policy, which has never been formally implemented before.

Only if there was an acquisition or merger would pilots actually "go with the planes".

 

So on this

I’ve asked the NC about the lack of “fragmentation” pilots go with the planes”. As explained, it’s not helpful for NK pilots as it stands because NK leases almost of their planes. So there wouldn’t be a purchase to transfer assets solely, the planes are owned by a bank, not NK. So it’s not like UAL can come in and negotiate with NK to only buy the planes, because NK doesn’t own the planes. So as stated above, it’s not a scope provision that would help NK pilots with almost all planes being leased.

Now if UAL decides to say “hey we want to buy NK to merge”, furloughed pilots historically get placed at the bottom of the integrated seniority list, regardless of hire date, and will be integrated as a furloughed pilot on the new list below active pilots.

 

I have a feeling this is shaping to be a USAir-like scenario with their two bankruptcies and hundreds of furloughs prior to the HP merger.

 

UAL is off the table as a merger partner. United already looked at the NK planes and its too time consuming and costly to reconfigure all the planes, especially since our seat supplier can barely keep up with our new planes and reconfiguring older planes, not to mention the debt and other integration issues.

Also with the Jetblue partnership, which was just granted full approval by the DOT, is going to be the focus going forward and not any acquisitions.