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.