baseball

Preach on my brother!

baseball

Chasing the same revenue is as simple as that. it's like two guys trying to date the same girl. There's a winner and a loser.

if everyone is diving in the same "fox hole" then that fox hole may not be big enough for everyone who wants to be in it.

If there is only so much to go around (revenue, flying, corporate profits, corporate greed) how ever you want to frame it, you may have to examine both input and output.

There is something a regional pilot can do. Refuse to fly mainline routes. Demand your union refuse to allow your pilots to fly mainline routes. We don't allow mainline pilots to fly "struck work." Same concept applies here. If our flying was stripped away from us, by whatever hard-core, low ball, scheming-kiniving, and jiving management and disguised as "scoped out" you gotta view that as immoral and wrong. i personally would refuse to allow my union to negotiate anything that takes revenue away from a mainline pilot and a mainline family.

That flying wasn't "scoped out" in some gentlemanly parlor game of chance, It was forcefully stripped from our route network. Let;s explain it in a way you can better understand it. When you "take it back" there are two ways to do it. You can island-hop one route at a time, or you can go nuclear and take it all back at once. I think island hopping our way back incrementally is smarter and less drastic. We can "un-scope" what was "scoped out from under us" by the likes of Johnathan Ornstein, etc. Taking it back has to happen in order to take back the profession.

Mainline dues should pay for mainline professional interests that is in the best interests of the mainline profession.

Just poll the pilots.........It's your money. If you poll the pilots, then the outcome is what they say it is, not what you hope it might be. I recall a long time ago ALPA saying they wanted to "take it back." That was 20 years ago. How we doing?

baseball

I looked back at the last 30 years of ALPA emails. I have no surveys asking me if I wanted to "give away any routes or flying."

Mainline pilots are tired of playing "3 card Monty" We're also tired of arguing our point with regional MEC secretary treasurers.

ReadOnly7

Still the same old broken record you’ve always been....right, Luis?

Regularguy

Regionals exist because the majors created them.

The majors contract regional airlines to fly routes to feed the hubs it’s that simple. They do not sell their own tickets nor market themselves.

The last time a regional airline attempted to go their own ended in a major disaster, as in liquidation. Look into the history of Atlantic Coast Airline also known as “bubble jet.”

The days of Air Wisconsin and other independent regional airlines are gone.

You all need to know the history of the industry.

da42pilot

United and Delta “chase the same revenue” because they’re competing airlines.

The regional model blows but so does this attempt at an explanation.

baseball

"APA split off from ALPA in 1963, and "pretty much everyone has forgotten any reason why," said Mitch Groder, an American first officer based in Philadelphia." This from the below article. Recall the serious debate on why American didn't go back to ALPA? Could it be ALPA's over-representation of the regional sector? I would welcome the mainline pilots of American within ALPA. That would be huge. How do you pull that off? Aren't the American Airlines pilots interests alligned with the vast majority of mainline airline pilots in US and Canada?

Unhappy American pilots to push union switch after five decades

Oct 24, 2016, Bloomberg News


"Some pilots oppose the return to ALPA out of concern that dues would rise and that the bigger national structure is inefficient. Also, the larger union represents regional airline pilots, whose interests don't always line up with those of the bigger carriers."

Why did American Pilots leave ALPA in 1963?

The history on that is strikingly similar to today. APA was born because ALPA sued their own APA MEC and NC Chair. Why? APA disagreed with ALPA on two major things: Crew Compliment and qualifications and the turbo-prop study. This Turbo-prop study was essentially the genesis of the commuter industry which gave birth to the regional industry. Just saying.....If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's probably not a rabbit.

baseball

When I think of revenue I think of "competition." Either competing against myself or competing against another not wholly owned, or fractionally owned by myself.

That's an external revenue stream, not internal. When you think of revenue, think of your own organic revenue within your own network.

if I owned taco bell, McDonalds, Burger King, In-N-out burger, popeyes fried chicken, KFC, Arby, and Wendy's I no longer have any real competition. But if i owned Bob's burgers as a family owned business with 6 franchise locations and my sister opens up a burger joint with my family name on it, and provides the burgers at 50 cents under my break even point she's stealing revenue from the family business. Heck, she's even using our recipe and our vendors for supplies. It's time to reign her back in or cut her out.

Itsajob

If ALPA has a conflict of interest between legacy and regional airlines and will not change, would breaking away from ALPA and having an independent union be an option? It seems to work for American and Southwest, however Delta and United have so far remained with ALPA. I’m not advocating dumping ALPA, I’m asking if going to a United only union would be a better or worse option?

baseball

I see what you're saying. I don't know.

I do know that ALPA representing both mainline carriers and regional carriers is bad for the profession of mainline commercial aviation as we have seen in the post 9-11 regional jet explosion and reduction in mainline flying routes.

The model provides "pseudo protection" under the current scheme. Just having 50,000 members, or xyz number seems to be the goal. ALPA's strategy is simply "strength in numbers." ALPA isn't focusing on the type of members, or the quality of what they have to offer, just raw numbers. So, if you're only focusing on numbers, and that's your goal then you likely have problems in alignment of priorities and goals. Hence, conflicts of interest are on the one hand ignored, and on the other hand tolerated.

The big attractant for smaller regional carriers is the "holy grail". The ALPA tool box. Having access to the ALPA services that smaller regional carriers under their ultra low cost model of compensation would require their union (if they had one) to charge 10 times the dues moneys they currently pay to provide the same level or near same level of service.

Essentially, the larger carriers that produce more dues moneys subsidizes the smaller regional carriers. our dues moneys can't go for mainline causes of action because it may hurt the regional industry. So, in turn it ends up hurting the mainline profession at large.

Perhaps an incremental approach would be logical. if United MEC spun off completely from ALPA it would have some pretty disastrous effects for ALPA as a whole. Likely the beginning of the end. So, I don't advocate that. I think a stronger and more effective ALPA would be the goal. if you have gang-green setting in on your foot, don't cut off the whole leg, just the infected foot. if the gang-green keeps spreading, maybe then taking the leg is logical.

Incrementally speaking, the most cautious and most conservative approach is to have the regionals form their own RPA If, after a period of time that didn't work further consideration of what you propose may be in order. For me, I would prefer to see a stronger and more effective ALPA. My opinion only is that if the RPA spun off, the APA might come back to ALPA. That would be a great trade in my opinion.