[QUOTE=Andy;3464798]Would you please list the improvements in the TA? During the roadshows, I was told that an earlier show on day 1 of reserve was an improvement.[/QUOTE

FO lines will now be out on the 15th.

New TUMI bag.

Guaranteed commute on the 550, I think?

Retro pay all they way back to January of 2022.

These are just a few wonderful improvements I can think of off the top of my head.

A lot of great points and I appreciate the well written response.

I think perhaps the two things that we either disagree or misunderstand are that I don’t love Scott Kirby, or think he is my friend and Secondly, I don’t believe in the concept of bargaining for what we deserve. When it comes to SK, I simply think his motives are far different than your average CEO. In the way that Richard Anderson wanted to leave a legacy, I believe Scott Kirby does as well. I agree with you that whenever the day comes that he walks out the door with his compensation package, I don’t think he will give a hoot about the performance of the airline. but as long as he is here, I do think his ego is very much tied to our public perception, not just his net worth, or the margins he gives the shareholders.

I very well could be naive. In my own business dealings and I suppose as a leader (mil, UA left seat, etc) my style is to give someone a lot of leeway, with a fairly large consequences at the end and of the rope. I’m vocal about my expectations and the outcome for non-performance, but I don’t threaten or change my demeanor when I need to drop the hammer. Perhaps for this reason I feel that a lot of the bluster on APC seems to be more for the benefit of the poster (and their perceived and desires control/involvement), than actual contribution to the cause.

In the end, each of us have a threshold for the next contract that we deem acceptable. My threshold isn’t based on any concept of “deserving,” because I think that concept (as well as fair) is incredible vague, subjective and used more often by someone trying to evoke an emotional response, rather than a rational one. Add to that, unless you believe in karma/reincarnation, most of us (who have the free time to come on here and argue if we should be making 250 or 300k) already have far more than we “deserve.” Whether you are a person of faith or not, it doesn’t take much in the way of ethical examination to see that the concept of “fair” or “deserving” is completely man made. My threshold for the next TA is about what I think is best for us over the next 10-20 years and admittedly, I don’t see as much value in “choking the golden goose” as I did in 2000.

To recap, Kirby definitely operates differently than tilton, Smisek, etc, but that doesn’t mean we can’t drive hard negotiations, I simply think they can be much more amicable and simple, rather than emotional or ego (by both sides) driven. And yes, all of our theshholds for an acceptable TA are different, and mine is different than many on here.

The “sell job” was very cringe-worthy to watch. I personally think that if the union had acknowledged that some of these things were not ideal, but they felt perhaps they gave something small and got something large back in return, I think pilots could’ve spent time trying to understand them. As it was, the communications were tone deaf, bordering on dishonest. I will lay out what I see are the benefits of the TA, or I guess things that I would be happy to see unchanged in the next TA.

- Training pay/scheduling improvements.

- Overtime pay. This one, whether it is sexy or not, I think it’s probably one of the big ticket items. It is a great concept and I think probably used up a large chunk for f our “allotted capital.” Unfortunately, I think it is one of those provisions that people cannot get excited about until it is put into practice and they benefit from it. If we don’t think it is valuable to us, I would imagine we could use a lot of that money in a different section to our own liking.

- WB FOs getting paid when they are rolled. Again, certain BESs seem far more vulnerable to this, but this could be a serious chunk of change for a lot of my friends who sit reserve on WB.

- Critical coverage override. Again, not something that is easy to get excited about, until you realize that your trip that touches one of the days around a holiday, will essentially pay for a lot your presents/festivities with the override.

- ANF flying provisions (huge for west coast crews. IMO, this will drive more pairings to end at a more reasonable time on day 4, because the min layovers drive flying on day 2, which rolls on til a 10 pm day 4 release). Obviously, their company’s choice on schedule construction is still theirs, but this is unequivocally a good thing.

- Soft restart not counting against extension pay. Another provision that is hard to get excited about until it happens to you. When crews are overseas and are choosing between doing the right thing for the passenger, at the expense of their paychecks, this makes it much easier for it to be a win-win for the passengers and our pilot’s bank accounts.

- Market based cash plan. I spill over every year, some year significantly. Having another retirement vehicle helps with that. I’m not a proponent for a pension, and if you look at our retirement plans, they are better than any other C-suite Employee I know. I put more of my own money into my retirement, and I would rather spend our negotiating capital elsewhere. As I have mentioned before, I would like to see the retirement contributions increased for newer employees. The basic concept is that if the company is going to put say $2 million into a pilot’s retirement account over the course of their career, it is far and away better for the pilot to have that money earlier, compounding, rather than later as a function of their increasing income.

- Obviously I do not think the reserve rules as they stand are an improvement. I mention this elsewhere, but the rules for reserve assignment construction have changed significantly. I completely understand for commuters that the early show is a nonstarter, and I agree. If the company wants that, I personally think they have to reduce the days to 16, essentially to create a four day work week for our pilots. But if that is the case, these rules give us far more ability to control our destiny on reserve.

- Reserve pay increases drastically

Little things:
Uniform allowance, medical reimbursement, downtown layover trigger, commuter parking increase, NB INTL override, NB Trip mix construction limiting 4-days, 60 min domestic shows (reducible for rest to original 45 min)

Also a good response. I agree with most of what you have written here.

I also agree we don't get what we deserve, as I was only mentioning that word for the purpose that we won't get that "pie in the sky" with a nice SK. We will only receive gains based upon the leverage we have.

Here's our biggest leverage:

Pilot demand has skyrocketed this past year: this is #1. If we have a better contract thru pay rates, 90% of pilots won't leave unless an equitable deal can be found elsewhere (which could come quick at DL/AA/SWA).
-- We are literally in a position where we are in the spotlight on national news for the first time in decades with respect to the demand for pilots. If we got a big raise, most of the general public would think that is expected and not blink. They would mostly think, "we want good pilots flying us around".

With the movement we have, keeping TK staffed is difficult. Also, the premium pay for LCAs isn't worth what they give up unless the person is just that dedicated to training. So it's a lot of work to go out with revenue passengers with the newer level of pilots we are hiring. They are less experienced and require a little more brain power and monitoring to get them up to speed. I would guess our average experience level has gone from 10-15 years experience to 5-10 years. Most of who we hire can bridge the gap, but we all know it does require a bit more attention to detail. Now one might argue the regionals have it worse than we do. While that's true, we also have much older guys sitting in the LCA position. Guys/gals who have been around the block and aren't looking to move up, so you need to incentivize that demographic more.
TK is a great job, but when you have many of your instructors senior enough to hold solid lines as NB CA or can hold WB CA somewhere else, it costs a lot to train new guys and get them up to speed with students that are less experienced than 10 years ago with less training.

The company wants 0600 report on day 1 of reserve. Doesn't matter it was a gift from FAR 117, it's still ours to keep or give away. This is worth a lot to the company. How much is it worth to you? We all saw with COVID that a small blip caused guys to be flushed back to reserve. It would be great to make reserve more desirable, but will we ever get there?

The company wants to have the flexibility of DL/AA with lineholders. DL/AA/SWA is trying to claw that back. We've seen how it has affected AA/DL/SWA and they are all trying to pattern bargain off us on this one. This is Big League YUUGE with management.
--They want this so bad they can taste it. UAL ALPA tried to sell this change for magic beans by telling us on the Zoom calls that it's not that big a deal, because whenever they reassign a lineholder, that just "kicks the can down the road" and they have to fill in the gap who was reassigned. If you have been at United longer than 3 months, you know that Scheduling "modus operandi" is to just do that, they are professional "can kickers". They will kick the **** out of the can down the road to fill the schedule. It's difficult to say how this will play out, but we all know this will decrease the QOL based on changes to the schedule. To what extent it will hurt QOL, talk to your bro/sis and ask how it affected them this summer.
--And also putting a lineholder in front of a reserve for schedule changes and removing the penalty of 125% premium to do so because "it was a low cost item since the company almost never used this provision". If you believe the company didn't use it because it wasn't a player to them, you are kidding yourself. The company didn't use that 125% provision often because that was the protection for us pilots. This is a direct QOL issue and will save UAL millions in premium pay and schedule reliability.

The company wants better reliability. They just don't want to pay for that increased reliability. These reliabilities should be a choice. Let the money grubbing pilots that don't care about anything except $$ choose to do these items to increase reliability. Don't force these upon us. We are paying for these efficiencies with our meager pay raise. I think many here think this is at best a cost neutral contract despite the advertised $1.3 million advertisement with $800 million/year costs.

The company wants to increase the scope killer CRJ-550 weight to make it viable. With the FAA weight increases because of fat Americans, we see that the FAA hurt SKs scope workaround(another gift from the FAA). They were high five-ing themselves as geniuses when they did this. You want to breath new life into 50 seaters? You think the pilot shortage will last indefinitely? I don't think so. I hate that this affects our commuters, but this isn't the solution that will help you out long term career wise historically. The company can add a SNB aircraft and then we have a lot more regional feed and smaller aircraft to those airports. I can tell you that when ALPA said there aren't many airframes out there that can be retrofitted to fit this 550 scope provision, so they don't think it will hurt us. I would go to Vegas and put $10,000 cash on this today that if we allow this, the company has something in store for more 50-seaters. Right now with the pilot shortage issue, it might not happen in 5 years, but when the aviate pipeline gets gen'ed up they could revitalize the RJ market. They are thinking long term, and this shortage won't last forever. What is this worth to you? If COVID 2.0 happens or Russia goes on a European tour, or 9/11 part 2 happens, what will happen? Are we given any protections for guys to flow back to these RJs? Nope. No protections, we will have furloughed pilots again while the company buys more 550s.

With the pilot demand we have right now, the #1 want for management is to increase our efficiency. We as pilots would prefer to gain QOL improvements. Those two items are in direct opposition to each other. The less efficient we are, the better the QOL. The more efficient we are, generally, we lose on the QOL issues.

Why pay for these items with our QOL right now? I forsee that we won't see a TA that will pass until the company decides 1 of 2 things:

1) Remove the bad items we don't like without removing the good. -The company will try and remove just the right number of bad items that will get 51%. I hope our union demands more than will get a 51% vote.
2) Add more good items to overshadow the concessions.

I'd say 1 is unlikely, but possible.
I'd say 2 is harder to swallow for the company, but if we can't come to TA 2.0 or provide significantly more toppings to the pizza, then we'll be looking at the current UPA for quite some time.





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Zoomie,

Great write up. I’ve read it several times and it gives me some things to think about.

Additionally, FWIW I feel one of the most egregious concessions was the ability to use non UA pilots to do FTB-B thru Maneuvers. I’m not on the building, but I’ve have fantastic experiences going through TK over the years and I think that is in no small part to the respect given and received by fellow line pilots.

I’ve done LCA work and although I think the discretionary provisions are a bizarre change, I also think you want people in that job who are there because they find the work fulfilling. I’ve seen other airlines where that isn’t the case (custom made schedules, big overrides, a management bullpen of sorts, etc) and I guess I can’t help but wonder what happens to our culture if the incentives change. I may be wrong there.

Thanks again for taking the time to do a more extensive post

Zoomie,

I just want to say you made excellent points in all of your posts. In the event of recalls, I hope you will run for an LEC position or be active with a new NC.

Thanks for laying out so many reasons why we are in the best negotiating position in a very long time.

High effort post. Excellent! Thank you.

I'd like to point out that our major gains include overtime pay, getting rolled pay, soft restart pay, as well as reserve pay. All pay, pay, pay, pay. So, where's section 3 at on this? Where's my actual pay? All I see is company control, control, control, control with $1k for weather on the side. It's cost variability. That's it!

Manpower's a rose but you'd better not pick it. It only grows when it's on the vine...

Some interesting items from the UAL Q2 Earnings Call.

The pilot shortage continues to impact broader airline industry. United remains dedicated to hiring at least 200 pilots a month. And with our International routes, wide body aircraft and higher career -- and high career earning potential, we are confident, United is the best place for pilots to build a career.

today, we have 10% more pilots available for blocked hours versus prior to the pandemic. Further, we broke ground on 12 new simulator bays to support the amount of pilots

However, infrastructure constraints and aircraft delivery delays will take time to fix and cannot be ignored. Pilot recruiting, training and retention, we believe, are real constraints for the industry for years to come.

Given that we ended the second quarter with about $22 billion of liquidity and we used cash on hand to purchase the four aircraft already delivered this year, and currently, we expect to pay for more than half of our total 2022 aircraft deliveries with cash on hand, though we remain flexible as we continue to monitor the economy and the recovery.

Paying for these aircraft with cash while paying down current maturities and opportunistically prepaying certain debt to build our unencumbered asset base, a win-win for the balance sheet. So far this year, we have reduced our total debt by over $1 billion, and with scheduled debt payments between $3 billion and $4 billion annually for the next several years, we will continue to have the ability to delever our balance sheet through normal amortization.

That being said, our bookings are still off the chart good, growing across the Atlantic, and our RASMs are accelerating.

And just on your corporate business. Sorry if I missed this in your prepared remarks, how much recovered was it in 2Q? And sort of what are your expectations as we head into 3Q and the back half of the year?

Andrew Nocella

It was 80% on volume and 75 -- sorry, 75% on volume, 80% on revenue. And while it is still improving, the rate of improvement has slowed for domestic, the rate of improvement for international still looks really good

So RJ ASMs used to be 7 point-something 7.5%, I think, of our ASMs. As we head to 2026, think of it as 3.5% to 4% of ASM because the economics of this business were going to change.

So this is a shift. We think it's a permanent shift. This is not a temporary cost increase for RJs. This is a permanent cost increase for RJs.

And again, service to small communities will have less frequency, but bigger aircraft. And we think that is the profit maximizing opportunity. And so we are not anxious to jump into a 120-seat narrow-body to fill this gap at this point.

The United Next in our plan never had more than 255 76-seat RJs in it.

But my question is whether the operational strains, the training pipeline, simulator -- all the pressures that exist right now, does that make it harder or easier to actually reduce capacity if there was some need to do so, if that makes sense?

Gerald Laderman

Those are temporary issues and -- the key for us is ensuring that we have full utilization of all the aircraft on-premises. So any aircraft that we have, we want to fly the appropriate amount of hours. So really reducing capacity is all about the fleet mix. And as we said before, we have plenty of flexibility there.

If Andrew decides he doesn't want as many aircraft flying. We will look at the retirement of the oldest aircraft, and we'll look at the flexibility we have on adjusting the delivery schedule and share it that way.

I’m new to the profession, but I really don’t see the negotiating power that many insist we have right now. The company wants more active pilots. That means (1) the company hires as many new pilots as they want/can train, (2) active pilots work, and (3) pilots don’t leave/retire.
(1) It seems like despite all the claims of sub-par compensation, new applicants are more than happy to accept job offers—we are not (yet?) losing pilots to other companies. Do folks think this will change? (i.e that new pilots will not apply to United) Is that a realistic forecast?
(2) I guess it depends who you believe on this one, but it sounds like United pilots will be legally bound to work until at least next summer.
(3) Again, is this a reasonable expectation? That pilots will leave the company due to an unsatisfactory contract?
So, if new pilots are streaming in, we are bound to work, and pilots aren’t leaving, where is our leverage? It doesn’t matter how much the company *needs* pilots, if they are getting that need fulfilled.

Thanks for the response.

Market based cash plan is smoke and mirrors. It doesn't exist and may never exist.

As for reserve, this TA is a huge setback for reserves. It's a lot of extra time on reserve for the possibility of a few extra dollars.

The company negotiators did their job well; too well, really. On the other hand, we used the 3 stooges to negotiate for ALPA. I'll add that along with Larry, Curly and Mo, we also had Shemp negotiating for us.