you said that UA flies the Airbus "borderline unprofessionally" ... give us some examples.

Have you PDR'd it? Have you emailed TK about it? Have you gone to the media about how "unprofessional" UA is flying the Airbus?

This will almost certainly change as:
-more pilots continue to come from B6, NK, and F9 where they actually know how to fly an Airbus
-UA’s Airbus fleet continues to grow & expand

Joint the training department or safety committee if you are that worried about it. It is definitely something I would welcome, the aircraft is just too well designed to be limited by the constraints of fleet commonality.

if I lived I Denver I would try to "get in the building" however I could.......something tells me my views on Airbus best practices wouldn't enhance my chances.

I have met at least two TK Airbus instructors (one former F9 one former NK) who agree with me.......they haven't brought it up too much for very OBVIOUS reasons. Which was kind of the genesis of the whole thread drift that...in a merger or acquisition they (B6) being the bigger Airbus operation...reverting to more Airbus school of thought for policy origination might just happen organically.

I know Liberty is just fuming at the mouth, but he up until my post didn't even know what FCOM was......

Also somewhat recently , Im not sure what year it was, but Airbus had the best score in the fleet in some safety metrics using FOQA analytics. Manny Instructors told me that they thought in part FMA callouts (a VERY AIRBUS thing) had at least some role in that.........I'm not making this up people.

TK guy told me it’s for fleet commonality and nothing else

If we merged with JetBlue guess how we’d fly the Bus?

right and that’s reasonable justification given the size of our Boeing fleet vs. Airbus……….but the ratio won’t be so unbalanced the more Airbus 321 that come on property, not to mention that ratio will converge even more so in a possible acquisition.

Guess what both groups have in common sport? Having as much say as the lav truck driver working the midnight shift in ORD.

I came from nearly a decade at F9 and am now Airbus at UA. I wouldn’t call the way United flies the AB unprofessional, but there certainly are some cultural things that seem “goofy” from my previous experience. Chief among them being the absolutely insane obsession about brake temperatures. Also, the weird aversion to using auto brakes an any landing, or the lack of trust in the auto thrust system. I admit that I enjoy flying manual thrust quite often for personal enjoyment, but many people I fly with never use it because they genuinely have some weird trust issues with it. I have never seen the Airbus autothrust perform poorly enough that I wouldn’t feel comfortable using it at any time.

Also have seen many pilots fly around for significant amounts of time in MCT thrust (which UA allows, but I thought Airbus did not?).

I'll assume this is a good natured ask... How do you think the posters on this thread know how many Pan Am pilots came over when we bought the Pacific operation? Same answer: we lived and worked through these events.

To answer your question directly a few different ways of proving:

1) our -700s have always been ships 701-740, plus 751 and 752 (ex Copa w/ the second main battery). This was the sub fleet prior to the 19 ex SWA airplanes and it's the sub fleet today. Thus, we did not put those tails into service.

2) At times we THOUGHT we were going to fly them. By this time we had retrofitted all the NGs to split schimitar (prior to this some NGs had the classic 'up only' winglet). When they all went split schimitar, the FM was edited to remove the old winglet info (dimensions etc). Well here come the 19 ex SWA NGs with the older winglets! So in a hurry they reinserted the winglet info BACK into the FM.

3) It was covered in the 'press' fairly clearly at the time. https://onemileatatime.com/united-ai...ying-used-737/

Hope that satiates your curiosity.

They will someday come around. I heard an old story that as Spirit was growing, Airbus more or less forced their hand at following strictly Airbus modus operandi.. saying we will only continue to support you if you adhere to our way of doing things. No idea if true.

It’s a superbly designed aircraft. I’d hate for UA to never come around to it.

it’s not lack of trust of the autothrust it’s just we like to hand fly without autothrust.

I completely agree about the auto brakes and brake temps. The guppy is taxiing around with their brakes on fire and we’re worried about ours hitting 300 degrees.

lol..no different at F9

I’m not sure what that means. We’ve had the Airbus longer than NK, Frontier and B6. If we haven’t “come around” in the 33 years since our first delivery, I’m thinking it’ll look rather similar for the next 33.

I think that what sort of the genesis of my joke to begin with is that we likely will NOT come around unless say 223 (plus 54 orders) A320 family of aircraft are introduced to our fleet. Even then, I don't think we will revert to Toulouse's policies but certainly there will inexorably have to be a fusion of policies.......and for the record there are things at B6 that are not Kosher with Toulouse.......but just significantly less than us.

It was my poor attempt at humor, since it would be bittersweet for me to see a reversion to more Airbus policy origination, simultaneously with my career progression being at its absolute worst........ since I was hired there last decade and here this decade.
Airbus industry practices and techniques is not really something I loose sleep over.......potentially merging with JetBlue certainly is.

I apologize it was just my poor attempt at comic relief to counter what may be career long depression.

Just do your future F/O’s a favor, when you upgrade, fly it the way we fly it and not the way your previous employer flew it. Your badge says United,
fly our manuals and procedures. If you want to make changes, sachet your way into a management fleet job and try to affect change.

Yeahhh….I don’t think I said I fly it the previous employers way…..but you know

Flew the Bus here at UAL for over 8 years (and looking forward to getting back to it!) and from my perspective it seems that we are pretty “liberal” on procedure vs technique. Obviously fly it per our FM and follow the SOPs, but technique is easy to do in many circumstances. Just brief the other guy/gal so they aren’t like WTF! So in summary, is the way we fly the Bus different from other companies? Sure. Is it unsafe? Absolutely not.

He's just mad he didn't get a chance to bankrupt JetBlue like he bankrupted Azul and TAP...

4% difference in payscale. Also, seniority between the two fleets is largely a wash in many percentile brackets. On the last displacement we had a fair amount of 220 pilots get involuntarily displaced to the 320 because they weren’t senior enough to hold the 220 anymore.

You see I never knew he had any involvement in TAP……….reading about it now it doesn’t surprise me. Privatizing a National carrier which may have had some problems but infrastructure all set up for him……..runs in it into the ground sucks out all the capital bleeds out all the resources and gives it back to the Portuguese taxpayer……..what a Neeleman move……..yeah funny that’s a documentary never shown at the Dave Barger Auditorium

Thanks for the updated info…..I have almost 4 years at UAL….so it’s tough get accurate updates. (I am NOT the most infamous former B6 current UAL pilot)

The UAL MEC just published a contract comparison guide.

Topped out Captains 320 vs 320:

UAL is 8.6% higher
For the 321…again with no over ride at B6 it is 12% higher.

On the FO side: (not many topped out FO’s at United but). It is 6% and 11% respectively.

Information everybody should know.

Even if United could buy only a portion of JBs operation I doubt they’d do it merely to add a 220 operation. If they had decided that 220s satisfied some unmet need, I think they would have ordered 220s some years ago. If indeed it were possible to “part out” JB, I think it would be the JFK gates they’d be going for.

I could see some JFK gates and slots being sold to raise cash. I can't see United buying any used planes from them.

I wonder who would be willing to pay for some JFK slots/gates?

Trump the other day said he likes having a lot of airlines because it creates more competition. So what does that do for the crowd that thinks the UA-B6 merger is inevitable because he’s gonna direct his administration to green light the antitrust problems?

I don’t think actually anybody thinks that B6 will merge with UA other than some hopeful pilots.

Actually there are people that think UA/B6 will merge besides the “hopeful pilots”, including some very worried pilots.

Safe to say that only ones that want the merger are B6 pilots. No one at UA would want that

As a B6 pilot I’m not hopeful or even rooting for it.

Don’t think anyone seriously thinks that there will be a JB merger. I’m sure that Kirby would write check for JFK slots today if they were available, but not at the expense of buying another company just to get them.

I don’t think that too many jetBlue pilots are hoping for an acquisition………..maybe the very very junior might be……maybe the odd ORD or DEN commuter (one in particular that has 20+ years who is just an awesome awesome guy) but I think it’s an overestimation made by others……talking with some of them there is a “well at least they have widebodies and we will never go out of business” consolation but I don’t think they want that at the expense of thier seniority……and I think all United pilots want our JFK slots (I don’t see Geraghty allowing that without an acquisition but she’s made a few mistakes in her career)

I have not heard one pilot here say they "want JFK slots". Maybe some legacy United people living in Long Island that are driving to EWR now but other than that its not widely talked about at all. Only thing management has ever said about JFK is bringing back the Premium Service flights and building out existing hubs. The current focus is ORD, DEN and IAH with some increase in WB flights as new 787s are being delivered. Not trying to start a new hub from scratch in super competitive JFK where you are now competing with every airline in the world, including Delta and AA. If anything that's a reason to NOT try and hub there.

Most pilots based in EWR either live in PA or NJ or commute. I can't imagine anyone wanting to now have to drive past EWR to get to JFK or commute offline to JFK to start/end a trip unless they live right near the airport. If they aren't on the Airbus it won't matter because that's the plane that going to be flying in and out of there (for now) and nobody is going to give up their WB job just to fly domestic transcons.

This. If it ever happened, I would imagine those trips would be flown out of the SFO and LAX bases, a trip that started in JFK would be a sick call bonanza in EWR.

Bingo. It would go just like BWI - flown by other base pilots.

EWR320 is a little bit of a different animal. I think there are a significant portion of Airbus folks that are happy that we will be flying out of JFK whether that's because they live closer (CT, NY) there or it's an easier commute.

The BWI pairings had a die-hard group of Maryland/Delaware folks who exclusively bid BWI and that didn't stop it from going away. Supposedly the company did the math and the parking + crosstown pay was way more than a hotel, so it went away.

I guess we will see. Who knows.

BWI trips were desirable by a select few DC pilots (those closer to BWI)…. Company stopped building them in the bid packages to avoid crosstown pay and use PP to fix broken trips that touched BWI..

Those JFK trips will likely be crewed by LAX/SFO Airbus crews

Maybe the bar should be set in the CBA where EWR and JFK are separate bases or they must provide DH transportation or in the case of LGA they reimburse transport from JFK, like we have.

We already have all that in the contract. EWR is the main base per the contract. Any trips that originate in LGA or JFK are already subject to a host of other things like pay, duty time, parking reimbursement etc. Its not a pay issue, but more of a convenience issue, especially if you are a commuter because you can't commute on United into JFK so while everyone else is getting PS during weather events to EWR you are trying to find your own way to JFK or LGA.

These are generally narrowbody problems, since all the WB are in EWR.