I feel your pain, my friend. I, too, was in middle school when my dad's job vanished when Braniff shut down in the early 80s. I'll never forget being on a school bus going on some field trip, and the route went right through DFW, and I stared out the window at all those multi-colored airplanes parked on the ramp about two weeks after they closed the doors. No one else on the bus could have cared less. It was a painful moment burned into my memory for life.

Books were written about Braniff's demise, and accusations flew all over the place. Was it Harding Lawrence who was responsible? Was Howard Putnam brought in by the board ostensibly to save the place, but secretly was he just brought in to shut it down? In the end, who knows.

The point for you to consider here is that the truth of the matter lies in tangled complexity that would require volumes of exhaustive study to fully comprehend. Your family went through the same pain and struggle that I and my family went through back in the 80s. The causes that led to that struggle were complex beyond any one person's ability to understand, and so it's easy to look for something simple to blame it all on: Putnam shut Braniff down! That was why he was hired by the Board! The UAL pilots voted to allow RJs! That's why my dad went out on the street after 9/11!

As I grew older and went through the 00s at UAL, I did come to understand that easy scapegoats are rarely the whole truth, they're just...easy. Comprehending the depth of complexity that goes into any long-brewing, festering wound requires a lot of painful digging and hard confrontation of the idea that sometimes it's really no one's fault. The knots are so tightly wound you can never really unravel them and say, "Ah-ha! It all boils down to this!" Real truth is often a great deal more muddled than that.

These are just thoughts from my own experiences that mirror yours. I hope you take them in the spirit in which they are intended: aviation brotherhood, rooted far back before either of us were born. Nothing is as simple as you think it might be.

I listened to the then CEO of Delta airlines back in 2000 state he could afford to pay a 777 CA 500,000 a year because the aircraft generated the revenue to support that wage. He then further stated that if he did pay that rate the problem was we would demand 400,000 a year for a 737 CA and the aircraft did not generate the revenue to support that wage. They had some slides on revenue per flight hour and it was astounding the difference. At least at Delta widebody flying subsidizes narrow body salaries.

CRJ1988,

I’ve asked twice if you want to work for UAL. Twice you have ignored a simple question. I will assume from what you have written that, no you don’t want to work here.

With that in mind just leave. You are doing no one any good by being on here.

Please just leave.

Biff

Apparently some do. :D

Another tomgoodman home run. Keep 'em coming.

After a few decades in this business this is a true statement. The one problem is just wide bodies (unless they are freight) can’t feed themselves and that is one of the reasons PAA failed.

UAL, DAL, AA cannot rely on other’s to feed their long haul wide body flying and that’s why control and marketing of domestic narrow body feed is essential.

Now should a 737 pilot get paid the same as a 777? If one can negotiate a pay package that does so, then yes.

You misinterpreted my comments. UAL was NOT in BK in the late 90s. Therefore the 1113c threat was moot at the time. APA struck in 1997 over RJs amoung other things. Where was ALPA? Had there been an solid trade union stance on outsourced flying, things may have turned out differently. You don’t have the right to curse RJs when you voluntarily opened the door. Just admit ALPA was naive. At least APA put up a fight.

You do understand that the RJ’s were already being flown at other carriers right? The APA had the advantage of seeing what the RJ’s were doing before they signed a contract and they still ended up letting Crandall buy them. At that point the genie was already out of the bottle. I’m sure you know this but you can’t retroactively put a scope clause into an existing contract, until Canadair decided to turn a corporate jet into an airliner the commuters flew turboprops with a couple exceptions like the Bac-146.

The biggest scope mistake back then was limiting seats instead of airframes.

Biff, I’m the grandson, son and nephew of UAL pilots. I would like to to continue the family tradition. I’ve seen the best and worst of UAL. I get fired up about guys complaining about 60% pay cuts in 2003. My family took a 100% pay cut. I have yet to meet a 2172 group furloughee who thought everything possibly was done in 03 to save their jobs. When I hear bluster about scope “choke” I have to think about who is choking who? Over 200 76 seat jets with UAL paint yet 0 are flown by pilots on the mainline list. I worry that Kirby will offer just enough cash to entice the top half of the seniority list to throw in the towel on scope. I sure help I am wrong.

Yes, Comair was the launch customer for Delta’s first CRJ. Where was ALPA? Did no one have the forsight to see what would happen? At Least the APA put up a fight.

Do you actually think it was ignored? It was, literally, a completely new concept that NONE of the mature contracts had language for. Hindsight is so much easier to make judgements with and you don’t just wave a magic wand and squash the problem. Combine that with 9/11 five or six years later and it was game on for airline managements.

I don’t know what United’s contract 2000 did to address RJ’s but it didn’t matter after 9/11. Continental put a limit on seats because the 76 seat RJ was being developed. In hindsight, a limit on airframes would have been a million times better. There’s that hindsight again.